Rove is a mobility service I have developed with a team of designer to deliver a high-end door to door taxi service for Jaguar & Land Rover. The service aims to fulfil the needs of a niche market as well as improve the brand perception and value.
The brand wanted us to validate and confirm if there was an actual need on the market for a high end service targeting only women, and if there was a lack of safety within the competitors. To do so we started with some Desk Research to analyse competitors.
After all the Desk Research, we decided to produce a quick Mock up on a iPad and to go to different upscale areas in London, introducing women of different ages to our service concept: a premium door-to-door taxi service with female drivers, for women only. We received mixed feedback, with almost all women stating that they did not care about the gender of their taxi driver.
We did also discover that for the passengers, luxury is often defined through the driver and the human interaction, an area which the most used services, Uber and Black cabs, are currently lacking.
Those statements helped us make a point and reframe the problem , the need of targeting only Women and having female drivers was not present anymore. Instead we would need to provide a scalable taxi service, that offers high end customers a complete door-to-door experience and provide not only responsive integration into the users life and consistent quality, but peace of mind for all stakeholders, at home and abroad.
The next step was to create a Persona that would resemble the Target Audience needs.
This would allow us to better understand her needs and pain points, leaving us space for potential opportunities.
One exercise that resulted very useful was the Stakeholder Map, a visual representation to identify stakeholders and categorize them in terms of their influence and interest in the project. This can provide insightful takes on potential partnerships as well as influcences and how to manage them.
The User Journey Map for Charlotte represents an end to end journey of our Persona taking a cab. Keep in mind all the layers are very important here, but is only by carefully filling all details that we get an Opportunities layer that can help us shape our Service.
As soon as we put down a rough draft of our service we decided it was time to test it out. Creating and setting up a Definition Workshop was the crucial step at that stage to present our idea to the client and make them aware of how the project was evolving. Exposing ourselves to feedback was very necessary to improve.
Finally after validating with the client our Service proposal, to test our final service concept, the team invited a group of possible users to our studio and run a Validation Workshop. We introduced them to “Rove” and explained the service step by step, then we asked them to share any positive and negative feedback as well as questions they had.
