Tesla
UX/UI | User Research | Personal Project
UX/UI | User Research | Personal Project
On a foggy Saturday morning in San Francisco, three friends and I sat down for coffee to catch up and get our caffeine fix. The conversation evolved into a discussion about a shared frustration with Tesla's car loan payments (classic San Francisco banter). As a non-Tesla, Ford Escape driving designer, I listened eagerly to their electric vehicle woes and started to notice a pattern within their pain-points. While all of my EV-friends were thrilled to have the opportunity to take out a loan to get their dream cars, the majority of them were unsure on how to make adjustments to their loans to fit their evolving lifestyles and financial needs. Curious to see if I could solve some of these issues, I embarked on my design journey to solve their frustrations by creating The Tesla Loan Feature within the Tesla App.
How can we integrate a feature in Tesla's mobile app that allows users to contribute additional finances to their monthly loan payment and gain visibility into their loan status?
Criteria: User has taken out a loan on a car currently or in the past
Number of Participants: 3
Method: Remote interview over zoom
A. What was your motivation(s) for taking out a car loan?
B. How much visibility and control do you wish to have with your payment plan?
C. What factors cause you to adjust your loan contribution?
1. Going to third part financier to view loan status
2. Unable to quickly contribute additional money to monthly loan
3. lack of transparency on loan status
1. Create an integrated, first party, system that grants users the ability to contribute to their monthly loan payment
2. Develop a method for users to quickly gain insights on the status of their loan and interest they are accumulating or saving
After I mapped out the user flow, my next steps were to make lo-fidelity mockups of the app. Designing in low-fidelity helped me think of use cases that I hadn't already discovered and produced a deeper sense of user empathy. Once I completed this iteration, I conducted a series of usability think-alouds with my previous interviewees. During these think-alouds, I was able to pin points where certain flows didn't make sense, copy needed to be updated, and the UX needed further thinking.
Based off of the feedback gathered from user testing, two major iterations were made. Many users were confused by the UI elements, assuming the box formatting was actually buttons. In addition, almost every user needed clarifying text to better explain the interactions being called to do. I simplified the UI by updating the boxes to line breaks and gave more separation between the CTA and the data to make it clearer on what the action was that the user needed to take.
Once the feedback was gathered, I applied it to the final iteration and created the high-fidelity version of the feature. Using Teslas design guide, I applied color and Tesla's font style.
The next steps would be to user test this feature with 7-10 test subjects. The goal of the user testing would be to ensure that both the user flow and the vocabulary. Due to lack of time and resources this step to gather data was not completed at this time.
