THE BRIEF: For drivers who value access and experience over possession, Cadillac aimed to offer a luxury membership with all the benefits of car ownership... and none of the pain. As innovative new mobility paradigms arise, Cadillac began investigating how a luxury auto brand can cater to the changing needs of affluent young professionals and families. With car-sharing services increasing in popularity and GM developing expertise through Let's Drive NYC and Maven, Cadillac requested my guidance in architecting an on-demand platform that creates an alternative ownership model for customers seeking variety, flexibility, and simplicity without losing premium quality.
DURATION: December 2015 through September 2016 (9 months)
MY ROLE: UX and product advisor to Cadillac strategy and marketing leadership
OUTCOME: Cadillac successfully pilots Q3-Q4 2016, launches commercial offering Q1 2017
Video: Introducing BOOK by Cadillac
THE INSIGHT: The next generation of young professionals and new families have a different perspective on car ownership than in the past. The traditional model of owning a vehicle in the garage is becoming viewed as burdensome, undesirable, and too limiting. These consumers want variety, and value personalized experiences. As a result, the automotive industry has seen a recent shift from one-to-one ownership model to one-to-many model where a variety of vehicle types and brands can be accessed through a mobile app. While Maven, Zipcar, and Car2go have developed offerings in this space, they often lack the premium and exclusive feel that many brand-conscious tastemakers desire. With limited competition in this market, Cadillac set out to attract this affluent, young customer segment to the brand by testing new on-demand service models.
Overall project plan including preliminary concept research, prototype (MVP) development, and pilot testing
THE PROCESS: The traditional automotive industry approach to product development is to conduct extensive analysis to define the "perfect product" then commit resources to go into production. This is often a multi-year process requiring major investment of time, resources, and budget. We approached this opportunity with an Agile mindset and set out to move quickly to develop proof of concept models that could be pilot tested with small user groups and rapidly iterated.
Our process began with a number of quick studies designed to better understand on-demand sharing experiences in related industries, as well as consumer perception of these services. Two key aspects of our research were 1) a competitive analysis of mobility ecosystem leaders, and 2) video concept testing via online studies with key target customer demographic segments.
Left: competitior mapping of mobility ecosystem. Right: detailed analysis of Clutch as competitive service model.
Competitive analysis helped to define the concierge-delivered vehicle exchange service model we would pursue for Cadillac's new service offering. The Cadillac business strategy team identified this as an opportunity to explore innovative new business models and extend the brand's reach to new customer segments which might not have considered Cadillac before. As the automotive industry transitions to focus on the overall mobility experience, we identified this as an opportunity for Cadillac to define the future experience of luxury mobility and defend against disruptive competitors.
We established a simple "Vehicle of Choice" UX vision for the Cadillac service through a storyboard for our target user persona, Miranda. The storyboard was then animated into a video which was used in a quantitative and qualitative study to assess target users' perception and consideration of the service.
Storyboard for online video study of "Vehicle Of Choice" scenario targeting affluent young professional demographic
Data from concept study demonstrating overall positive response to concierge-delivered vehicle exchange program
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT: I lead further concept definition workshops with the Cadillac team to define key use cases and product features. We used journey mapping exercises and our early research findings to establish early definition of the best Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test in a pilot launch. I lead sessions to envision and define key steps along the customer journey, from initial discovery through a marketing website to enrollment, searching for a vehicle, making reservations, taking a trip, and scheduling future vehicle exchanges.
Customer "Day in the Life" journey maps were created to describe typical scenarios. Three examples below:
Definition of use cases and key features based on competitive analysis and product vision concept testing
PRODUCT DESIGN / USER EXPERIENCE: Based on our MVP use cases and key feature requirements (shown above), we developed logic flows and wireframes for the customer-facing mobile app and the operations back-end system. This required us to take a systems-level view of the entire experience and map the architecture for the end-to-end process. I partnered with a team of UI designers to translate wireframes of the experience into mock-ups of the mobile app screens. These were developed in parallel with the back-end systems which our software engineering and engineering system architecture teams worked together to design and build based on the requirements and logic flows we provided them. The outputs from these design cycles were a functional MVP mobile app allowing pilot testers to schedule exchanges reservations (see above), and a simple operations management interface allowing the Cadillac team to manage vehicle and reservation data.
Cadillac Reserve system architecture diagram
Design mock-ups of select Reserve by Cadillac mobile application screens
PILOT TESTING: As part of our project plan, we planned two pilot phases which we described as "Co-Creation" and "Beta" tests. The Co-Creation pilot was designed to leverage a small community of hand-selected users to test the MVP we have developed to ensure delivery on the value proposition, user experience, messaging, and program operations.
An initial cohort of 20 users were selected within a geofenced area in Manhattan to use the system for 30 days. This group was ramped up to 50 users over the course of the 90 day pilot. This allowed the team to understand vehicle fleet size, vehicle fleet mix, operational demands, and other learnings. From this initial pilot, we validated assumptions that our target user -- the "Next-Generation Luxe" customer -- does indeed find the Cadillac Reserve model a compelling offer. We studied users' perception of the brand and the program, and saw uplift in Innovative, Youthful, Consideration, and Opinion metrics.
Initial "Co-Creation Pilot" showed positive outcomes with key customer segments
THE LAUNCH: At this stage, the Cadillac team began preparing for the next phase of project. The public Beta launch of the program required further development iteration of the UI/UX based on usability feedback collected from initial pilot users. Additional changes to the branding strategy lead to a new name: BOOK by Cadillac.
I transitioned off of the program as Cadillac assigned a dedicated in-house team to continue developing product and operational elements. In January 2017, BOOK by Cadillac was publicly announced and began taking member applications for its beta launch in NYC. Initial reaction to the offering was positive from both consumer and media audiences. A media review of the beta experience can be found here:
