Waiting for the Volkswagen of your dreams

Say hello to The Waiting Room - innovative communication platform for customers awaiting their new car.

Our long-term client - Volkswagen - asked us to develop a tool supporting the new brand customers with comprehensive knowledge about the order model. The wait for your dream car can be tiring and sometimes even frustrating. Our job was to make it more friendly and predictable. As a result The Waiting Room platform was designed, allowing users to stay as close to their ordered product as virtually possible.

The Waiting Room platform is a comprehensive source of knowledge and information about your new Volkswagen delivery status, supplying necessary education and lifestyle content about the purchased model to the final customer.

In order to develop a highly complex and variable digital product we had to:

recognize the user characteristics,
discover their needs, fears and limitations,
find out, how they consume the digital jungle,
research the most popular online trends.

Challenge 1:

Waiting room - who is it for?

Challenge 1:

Waiting room - who is it for?

In the course of the initial analysis 3 main insights were established:

how users use the digital products,
what are their expectations,
do they have any habits and principles while consuming the internet,

Thanks to advanced monitoring tools we have shortlisted key micromoments in everyday lives of Volkswagen drivers in which our product could become most useful and proposed personalised and valuable content. Individual in-depth interviews provided us with precise insights and expectations of future users.

Cooperating with our client we conducted a series of ethnographic interviews of social media consumers, expanded the typical Volkswagen personas and introduced a representation of most common potential Waiting Room users. Their behavioural patterns allowed us to define key project challenges, KPIs and opportunities to move in front of the competition on the automotive market.

Challenge 2:

Strategy

Challenge 2:

Strategy

The Waiting Room platform received 12 main goals. Impatience and frustration while expecting car delivery were not the only key factors. Customers seek lifestyle inspiration, travel assistance, upselling opportunities, personalised offers and most of all an open an engaging dialogue with the brand.

At this stage 29 detailed scenario were created, which represented a variety of most common behaviours among the target group. These scripts allowed us to finalise a closed list of key product features.

Challenge 3:

Modelling

Challenge 3:

Modelling

Furthermore we began working on:

user maps
information architecture
mockups / low-fidelity designs (based on research and and benchmarks)
hi-fidelity mockups (figma)
wireflows (figma)
interactive mockups (UI)

A coherent digital product construction is based on user maps - most common experiences, which play a key role in defining successful navigation paths, content distribution and main features. What follows are user case stories converted to basic website architecture information.

Once we acknowledged the whole scale of the platform, we came to realise the conclusive scope of development. Clear challenges emerged, which had to be taken into consideration while sketching the prototypes. Localised interaction design was just around the corner.

At this stage the homepage has been created, providing users basic and mandatory information and content. Main features of the platform, like order process management, interactive car model configuration, formal purchase status, all took into consideration personalised user needs and expectations.

Challenge 4:

Home screen

Challenge 4:

Home screen

Surrounded with plain walls we found it easy to use an endless amount of post-it stickers and pencils. We started drawing conclusive schemes based on defined key issues, module features, user mapping and research. Each team member had just 10 minutes to propose solutions solving main problems, out of which the most eligible were chosen to the next steps. As a result we developed over 45 views, which together combined a final Waiting Room roadmap.

To provide our client with wireflows and clickable prototypes, we decided to use Figma as a design and interaction platform.

Challenge 5:

Sketching

Challenge 5:

Sketching

The main goal of UI phase was to test the product on a mostly finalised prototype. Users had the opportunity to engage with the product as visually and practically as possible. New Volkswagen brand identity had to be taken into account while deigning the final screens.