market research • discovery • user interviews • researchops
Uncovering Car Ownership
RepairPal is a multi-sided marketplace offering a plethora of product experiences around car repair, from fair-priced estimates to connecting consumers with trusted and certified repair shops for their vehicle needs.
As we were approaching 2022 and brainstorming the next phase of growth for the company, it was critical that we established the following:
A baseline for why consumers were coming to RepairPal
Determining how to provide additional value to our users beyond the repair process
This end-to-end research project took place in Q2, 2021.
Timeline
I was the Lead UX Researcher on this project, working alongside a Product Manager to establish a product research strategy as well as with our Lead Designer to plan and host the team opportunities workshop.
Team
Identifying Opportunities
Capturing Sitewide User Intent
Based on a site intent survey we conducted in early May 2021, roughly 45% of RepairPal visitors came to our site to “try and figure out what’s wrong with their vehicle” and be able to take action on the issue - that is, getting a fair-priced estimate and finding a shop to perform the repair. However, when asked if they would return to the site, most responses were “situational”, meaning that if consumers foresaw problems with their car or were planning on purchasing a new car, they would visit the site. This indicated a growth opportunity for RepairPal to expand beyond the repair-process step in the vehicle ownership lifecycle.
Real World Relavance
According to the 2021 Capital One CreditWise survey, finances were reported as the number-one cause of stress for 73% of Americans, but more specifically, around 61% of Americans were stressed because of a car purchase. However, consumers tend to think about their vehicles only when there are “issues on the horizon”.
Over the past 5-year period, there has also been a steady increase in the number of vehicles owned per a household, spanning to three or more. With the increase in household size, there is a strong correlation with the increasing number of vehicles to accommodate them. Simply put, consumers are concerned about their vehicles, and the opportunity for RepairPal to alleviate one of life’s major stressors by tackling ownership became increasingly apparent.
Conducting Interviews
While there has been industry validation that car ownership is becoming increasingly important for consumers, it was important for me to talk directly with our consumers and understand their habits as car owners.
Before narrowing in on conducting user interviews, I had also considered using a survey methodology to initially gauge some insight around car ownership challenges. Running a survey would be advantageous in terms of having access to a larger pool of our RepairPal users as well as getting the feedback in a quicker manner. However, as I began to think through what the end goal would be for this research study, it became more apparent that I wanted to have an open-dialogue with our consumers and dig into their various experiences as car owners - not just generalizing their challenges and bucketing them into categories. Hence, to be able to dig further into car ownership and its challenges, I moved forward with my decision and conducted 1:1 interviews with RepairPal users who had recently scheduled or completed a repair appointment.
Developing a Research Plan
As I began crafting my research plan, my first step included writing out my interview guide with questions I would plan on asking our RepairPal consumers. With the initial findings from the site intent survey I ran earlier in the year, it was clear that there was more to the car ownership story than what we had insight into. While we learned what brought our RepairPal users to the site, we didn’t have an understanding of the decisions our users came to prior to the awareness of getting their vehicle serviced or the aftermath of continually managing their vehicle’s health. These two pieces of the puzzle are critical to uncover, as they paint the full picture of what car ownership is.
I brainstormed a few rounds of questions, eventually narrowing on the themes that were rooted in the potential opportunities that RepairPal could support given our current ecosystem of products.
Car Purchasing - What car(s) do you own? How long have you had your car(s)? Did you purchase them new or used?
Length of Ownership - How long do you tend to keep a car for (until you replace/get a new car)?
Common Challenges - What are some challenges you face as a car owner?
Repair Frequency - How often do you get your car repaired? Is there anything that prevents you from getting a repair done (or more frequently than you’d like)?
Recruitment Process
As a team-of-one researcher, we did not have any processes set in-place for recruitment and outreach at this time. This project served as both a new research venture in conducting interviews directly with our users, as well as establishing new, collaborative processes around recruitment, scheduling, and incentives.
Timeline of research project, end-to-end
Email Outreach
The first step in this recruitment process for me was to determine the users I wanted to reach out to. Given that we collect the emails of RepairPal users who create appointments, I decided to target those users who recently created or had appointments. In addition, these users also indicated high intent, since they went through a conversion flow and booked an appointment since they needed a repair service for their vehicle(s).
Since I had the emails of our RepairPal users, the second step in my process was to set up an email outreach strategy. In working with one of our product managers, we decided that using the same email service we use to send our reminder emails for recently booked appointments for our outreach tool would be simple enough to execute from a technical perspective while also maintaining a similar format for familiarity with our consumers. Within the email, I had included a link to my Calendly, where I set up 30-minute slots for consumers to directly book virtual meetings. I had provided a 3-week window along with an indication for a gift card incentive to increase widespread interest and participation.
Incentive Distribution
The last step in this recruitment process was to work with our Finance team to determine incentives and handle the process of sending them out to our participants following the successful completion of the interview sessions. We had decided sending out Amazon gift cards directly to our participants, through their emails used to set-up the interview sessions, would be the simplest method. To make this handoff to Finance as smooth as possible, we created the following shared process: following the completion of a session, I would send over the test participant’s email address to the Finance team, in addition to following up with the participant the following day to ensure they received their gift card.
As a small company, we didn’t have the budget to invest in a recruitment agency or a scheduling platform; however, we made the process work by establishing our own internal method of outreach. It was also a great opportunity to work with our Finance team and foster a working relationship for future research projects that require recruitment and incentive-handling.
Research Insights
During the course of 3 weeks, I conducted 1:1 interviews with 15 RepairPal users spanning across the country and with varying degrees of automotive experience. Before delving into the key findings from this research study, I’d like to share some of my reflections around the process of formulating the high-level themes from the interview sessions.
Prior to this research effort, we had not dug into customer challenges and pain points at a foundational level, removed from our RepairPal ecosystem of products, so it was imperative for me to not only understand these issues but also take the time to extrapolate the overall themes in a manner that could be referenced in future projects. Having succinct documentation of findings would help democratize and socialize research within the company, as well as increase its prevalence in decisions being made around our overall company goal of growth. To help make the insights digestible, I categorized the findings into the following themes: experience with cars, history of ownership, and challenges with vehicle management.
Automotive Experience
Most RepairPal users are experienced car owners but not necessarily well-versed in the automotive space, ranging from familiar to experts.
Familiar - not sure how to diagnose an issue with a vehicle but can identify that something is off or not normal
Intermediate - more knowledgeable than the “average individual” and can perform basic repairs and general maintenance
Expert - background in the automotive industry and can perform a variety of repairs (but bring vehicles into shops rather than doing it themselves
“We don’t know everything but we know enough.”
— RepairPal User
Ownership & Maintenance
Delving into car ownership, our users own anywhere between 1 to 4 vehicles at a given time, depending on the household size and transportation dependency. Most users keep up-to-date with the regular maintenance, such as oil changes, but aren’t always as prompt with major repairs. While this may seem to be largely dependent on just cost, it can also be attributed to reliance on the vehicle for transportation or difficulty bringing the vehicle into a shop due to busy work schedules.
An interesting nugget we gained from the research was that consumers had two different “philosophies” around the duration of keeping cars -- some users hold onto their vehicles for just a few years while others keep them as long as possible.
For our users who tend to keep cars for just a few years, they mostly lease out cars and change them more frequently based on their needs at the current time. On the contrast, the users who hold onto their cars for as long as possible like to pay-off their vehicles as soon as possible and will only get rid of them for one of three reasons: (1) there are multiple back-to-back repairs, (2) the car’s value is less than the repair cost, or (3) the car is no longer drivable/safe.
Challenges with Vehicle Management
Being a car owner presents its own set of challenges, but the 3 main areas our users tend to struggle with include cost, trust in mechanics and repair shops, and keeping track of vehicle information and relevant documents.
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Repair costs tend to be the number one factor preventing users from getting repairs done as frequently as they can or having to put them off until they can be afforded.
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A few users expressed that they’ve faced instances where they’ve been ripped off by a shop or that their vehicle’s issue was never repaired. This challenge is the foundation for RepairPal, connecting consumers with fair-priced and trusted shops that go through a rigorous certification program that ensures that consumers won’t be ripped off.
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From insurance claims, warranty information, and DMV registration documents, to vehicle details and repair history, there are a lot of car ownership documents users have but no centralized manner to keep track of them.
Because car ownership can be a major life stressor, true vehicle management is delivering that “peace-of-mind”. As our users described the challenges they face as car owners, two main opportunity areas emerge.
Offering financial assistance can not only help reduce the stress around affordability but also will allow repairs to be done more promptly (avoid having larger damages occur to the vehicle if put-off longer).
Providing maintenance scheduling reminders will allow users to think of one less thing and ensure that their vehicle is kept up-to-date and healthy.
Leveraging Research Insights
Following the completion of the research project, I held a workshop with our Product and Design team, where we spent time defining the needs of car owners and identifying how we can create product experiences that can fill in those missing gaps. Up until this point, I had gathered quantitative insight into what our RepairPal users came to the site for as well as qualitative insight into what challenges our RepairPal users faced as car owners. The one area we still hadn’t addressed was determining how RepairPal could bridge the gap between its current offerings and the common challenges associated with car ownership.
Competitive Analysis Workshop Planning
Our main activity was based around a Competitive Analysis done with indirect and direct competitors. Screenshots of various companies' products as well as common car ownership challenges were placed on a whiteboard. The team was broken up into two groups, with the task of finding screenshots that were relevant to solving the problem(s) their group had chosen. The main goal of this activity was to identify design solutions that could address the problems we uncovered through conducting interviews while also allowing for collaboration between product and design in an open-space.
As a result of this activity, we had identified, as a team, that our first step in creating a solution that focused more broadly on vehicle ownership was to strengthen our foundations around Accounts. Our current experience contains a user’s basic vehicle information (if they have an account and update it) but lacks touch-points to other parts of the site. Furthermore, there is no value-add for consumers in creating an account, as there’s nothing a user can do/benefit from having created one. By strengthening our Accounts foundation, we can build upon maintenance reminders and vehicle documentation in the next phase of growth.
RepairPal Product & Design Team ‘21
A massive thanks to Chandler Gassman for her phenomenal graphics to visually aid my stories.