Virtual photo estimates for auto repairs
What if you could get an estimate for repairs without leaving your driveway?
Who I designed for: USAA
Platform: Mobile
My role: Lead Designer
Setting the stage
Previously, a 3rd party solution was used to capture photos of damaged vehicles after an accident to create a repair estimate.
After using this solution for several years, our business partners were receiving a large volume of complaints about the difficulty customers were experiencing using the product and asked us to design a better solution.
Early findings
Our team conducted qualitative user testing with real customers in our Claims Lab to assess the problems with the 3rd party solution.
Our primary findings found that customers had difficulty understanding what photos were required and why, how to capture the VIN on their vehicle, and understanding if they were successful in uploading their photos.
We synthesized user sentiment and created insights. We used these insights to ideate potential solutions that were presented both to our business partners in a storyboard.
After this, our business partners tasked our team with designing an in-house solution.
How we came up with a design
After first, we created a coded prototype based on the preexisting 3rd party solution since this project required use of the phone’s camera; however, security constraints prevented us from testing this prototype and caused us to think outside of the box.
I proposed we printed physical copies of the design to have participants imagine their experience with the product. This real-world testing helped us to refine the experience rather than blindly launching to production.
After several iterations and rounds of low-fidelity testing, final screens were created and put into production.
Results
While the designed solution has only been in production a short time, analytics in production are pointing to an improved completion rate for digital estimates and increased self-adoption of the tool by customers.
Our business partners have also noted a decrease in calls to adjusters requesting help completing the flow.