MCM Tint - Providing the Tint Experience to Car Lovers
I was contracted by MCM Automotive Tint to create their website design and experience for their customers. Our goal was to increase the number of people scheduling appointments. Our secondary goal was to increase site engagement by reducing the overall bounce rate. I interviewed stakeholders for their business and technical requirements and consulted on expectations, project status, and deadlines.
🔑Deliverables: Wireframes, Mockups, Style Guide, Website
Duration
November 2021
Role
Product Designer
Responsibilities
Branding, Research, Design
About
MCM Automotive Tint is a family-owned, professional tinting shop
MCM Automotive Tint specializes in providing style and comfort to your vehicle and is well known for using high-grade, quality window film or removing tint. I was tasked to create the website design and increase site engagement.
Problem
Discovering and trusting small businesses is hard
Consumers lean towards shopping on notable e-commerce sites, like Amazon, for its easy and convenient in-app shopping experience and delivery service. With thousands of reviews and products, easy return options, and friends and influencers recommending predominantly Amazon products (#Tiktokmademebuyit), it is making it difficult for small businesses to compete.
While people want to support and connect with local businesses, they find it hard to find small businesses they like and build trusted relationships.
Research
What are other Automotive Tint agencies doing to engage potential customers?
My teammate and I interviewed 11 consumers who have shopped small before and how it impacted their decision how they shop. We asked them how and why they shop small and identified the motivations and frustrations of their shopping experience
Summarized Painpoints
Lack of community: No large professional network exists for solely small businesses
Lack of directory: Information is fragmented across different platforms
Lack of information: It’s hard to find information about the small business they make like.
Lack of trust: The convenience of large stores competes with small businesses minimum resources
Design goals
Providing clear and transparent context to help people with their decision to use MCM’s tinting services
Based on the user research, the designers, researchers, and I created design principles:
Cater to main audience: Car owners looking to protect their investment
Transparent context: Car owners need to be informed about their options
Streamline information architecture: Key information about the tinting process should be easy to find so people don’t feel lost and confused about the process
Support: People need to understand MCM Tint will support and answer
Feeling of ease: Help people feel their car will be protected and in great hands
Ideation
Explorations through discoverability, relationships, and autonomy
I focused on ways to increase discoverability, autonomy, and build relationships to incline people to shop small.
User Flow
What is the New Customer Journey?
Below is the end-to-end cohesive user experience for new, potential customers.
Summarized Painpoints
Lack of community: No large professional network exists for solely small businesses
Lack of directory: Information is fragmented across different platforms
Lack of information: It’s hard to find information about the small business they make like.
Lack of trust: The convenience of large stores competes with small businesses minimum resources
Style Guide
Creating Brand consistency throughout pages
I created a style guide for MCM Tint to follow.
Option A increases small business discoverability matching consumers to tailored recommendations. Option B increases discoverability through exploring friends or popular collections.
Option C lets people see what’s happening in their local community and easily discover what’s near them. People can stay up to date with their favorite businesses to increase engagement. Option D was designed to encourage people to shop small, however, raises concerns of utility and being out of design scope.
Both Options E and F give owners the ability to express themselves and market their business.
After interviews and key insights, I iterated on the previous design ideation to reflect consumers’ motivations and frustrations. With the competition’s time constraint, I, unfortunately, did not have enough time to conduct usability testing and iterate after feedback.
Final Design
A social platform to discover, connect and build trusted relationships with small businesses
Tienda begins by a simple set of questions returning tailored recommendations based on their interests and values. With owners having autonomy over their profile content and people discovering and sharing local businesses, people are more inclined to shop small.
Discovering new small businesses is a breeze—search businesses by category, their hosted events, curated lists, or values-based tags such as ecofriendly or woman-owned. Tap the business profile to learn about the business, the owner, their story, and their mission so you can support businesses you value. Stay up-to-date with the businesses you follow on your newsfeed and see what reviews and ratings your friends are leaving. Tienda creates an authentic social experience to discover and connect with local businesses.
This helps people trust small businesses and make easier, smarter, and quicker shopping decisions.
Measuring Results
Measuring the engagement and value of Tienda
Although this is not an app currently in the market, there are still KPI’s in which I could set to measure the success of the app:
Engagement metrics
# of downloads, reviews, and ratings
# of collection creations
Time spent on the app
Net promoter score
Monthly active users (MAU)User satisfaction
These metrics can indicate how the app is being used if there is value, and whether this app is successful.
Vision
Providing more value to business owners
We want to continue building out the app, test and validate often so we can make sure to deliver on what our users want. We also want to add more value to the business side of Tienda. Setting up an analytics dashboard for business owners to understand their profile performance, add messaging features so businesses can increase engagement with customers, and help connect businesses to partnership opportunities within the community. We plan to strengthen small businesses' support nationally which results in stronger local communities.
Key learnings
Focusing more on features than design explorations diverts from solving the overall problem
Defining an overall problem and supporting pain points along with an overall design goal with supporting design goals is crucial. By having a clear understanding and goals, the ideation phase becomes easier because it is more focused if I am effectively solving the problem rather than creating a plethora of nice-to-have features.
