Amazon Vehicles Exploration
Finding disruption in an industry rife with possibilities
Amazon wanted to explore where the opportunities to be disruptive in the automotive space were. I am a HUGE car nut. Anyone who knows me knows that this was the perfect role for me.
MY ROLE: UX/UI Designer
Project management and strategic direction (until a PM was to be hired)
Competitive analysis and research oversight
User stories and flows
MY WORK: I was the first person hired on the team, to include a PM, TPM, UX and small dev team. Vehicles being a passion of mine, I took on this challenge and started by identifying the landscape, writing a document (Amazon best practice). Next I identified tenets, brainstormed the landscape, talked with partners, mapped out the user journey, did a competitive analysis, and started ethnographic research.
This was green space thinking – we were trying to identify opportunities in the automotive space. I tapped my own knowledge as well as some of my other car-nerd people to see where the different touch-points in the experience interact. Below is the whole brainstorm as well as a zoomed in view for details (it covered the whole wall!)
At any point in a customer’s car life-cycle, there are numerous friction points. Almost everyone has a horror story with some aspect of the process, from the research, the dealership, the maintenance, or other parts. Where could Amazon, with its large infrastructure and resources help solve some of these issues?
Redefining the space
From all of this I defined an automotive flywheel to see where the different touch points in the experience interact.
I spelled out user journeys with the problem, solution, benefits, concerns, and potential features. Fidelity was purposefully kept low so that we could focus on the ideas, rather than the visuals. And folks really responded well to the cartoonish quality of the illustrations.
A tool for making decisions
As always, tenets provide a viable means of keeping the team aligned and moving in the right direction as things progress. I had just lined up a research partner to start doing exploratory research when the project was cancelled. The best (and shortest) three months of my working career!
A large amount of work was done in three months laying the groundwork for a future when, as is inevitable, the business focus moves from strictly platform-wide initiatives into targeted initiatives. The work I did was reviewed and commended by our Director, however the decision to cancel was above him.