The Work
What was done I helped YourMechanic move to the next level with their experience. Helped to revolutionize the way traditional industries serve their customers both at a consumer and fleet level. While empowering shoppers with the a easier to use service - this with digital tools YourMechanic was able to make informed vehicle-servicing decisions quicker and with less technical debt. Initial research clearly showed that the existing website fell short of its ambition, and somewhat underrepresented the activities of its users needs.
The recommended design direction centered on allowing a broader variety of testing types representing multiple aspects of the organization to “bubble up.” From there, I worked to build it out in 2 phases. Design and craft a visually dynamic solution that delivers on all counts for the longer term — both aesthetic and functional. The other path of the solution: a custom content testing system uniquely tailored to meet the immediate needs, and flexible enough to empower them as they move forward with new online content initiatives in the future.
After an experimentation phase delivering prototypes, web services and small mobile apps, they decided to take the plunge and move their entire offering to the web and mobile app. This transition would involve a tremendous technical effort, and require entirely new skills for their entire team. Intergrating new monitoring, tags and services was a testiment to the goals of the company, ...but most of them had no real exposure to modern best practices like test-driven development or asynchronous microservices .
Growing this new system would also require growing their team, and general awareness of "data driven decisions" at this level. Throughout the project, the impact of the data helped scale everyone on the team, along with the users satisfaction. I partnered with data leaders like Heap and Fullstory and with the hep of the engineering teams I was able to ensure the product was flexible, reliable, and keeping on track with the business goals and objectives.
What we got was a modernized e-commerce site with a new website smell and feel. When both customer satisfaction and ease of use were in question — We kept asking the users and I was able to supplement, create and execute on a comprehensive platform through data and metrics. What the public got from the relaunch was a new website/experience ; what YourMechanic got was lower barrier of entry to new features and metrics courtesy of all new technology and tooling.
After extensive user testing - across all platform/persona types: Admin, Mechanics, Parts, Userbase (past and present) we had a baseline of data to make some very historical decisions towards the current landscape of YourMechanic. Helping YourMechanic on their quest to become more and more customer-centric, make their systems more future-friendly, and lower their operational costs. One of our frontend specialists had been instrumental in the rollout of a new frontend framework that lowered technical debt, and the conversion of the components into new REACT modules.
This allowed us to adjust the flow and test individual components at the Macro and Micro level. This work included rebuilding lead generation and instant offer forms. As well as adding white-labelling and individual sponsorships based on specific cars and years. We implemented module history for all flows. This allows a user to understand changes to a particular services over time, as well as average market ranges and market prices for similar services.
The teams have helped also update their core web and mobile functionality and worked to improve elastic search and localization (most users asking for some sort of price comparisons with other shop within a "X" radius of the user). The team members continue to help build and ship ecommerce features including finance options, and provide on-going guidance and practice modeling that helped YouMechanics internal teams capitalize on the value of agile development.
