Zoom — Amarachi Umoren - Product Designer

Zoom Web and Mobile app.

Zoom is a car rental company that specializes in renting out Sedans, SUVs and trucks to individuals and organizations for a fee.

The problem.

In the last two years, Zoom noticed that fewer people are using their services. Zoom is looking for a solution to make more money and make it easier for their customers to rent cars.
The owners of Zoom, having done their research, believed that their customers needed a better way of renting cars out that is fast and seamless using technology; as opposed to the manual way they had been doing business, where people needed to appear in person for all the car rental processes.

Design Process.

Research.

The goal of the research was to determine the potential users of Zoom and their possible pain points with car rentals. I employed various research tools to ascertain the users’ contexts and needs. Some of the methods used were:

Interviews
Competitive research
Market research

Research questions.

How has the competition solved these problems and what existing solutions are there to learn from?

What digital tool works best for the business?

What are the main reasons users are renting vehicles for? How do we upsell services?

What is the ratio of individual users to organizations that rent cars

What locations are users renting the most vehicles from and why?

Interviews.

The interviews were the primary source of data for the project. The participants for the interviews were selected using the following general criteria:

Residents of Lagos (Zoom’s primary area of operation)
Age 18+ (this is the legal age to drive or rent a car)
participants were selected across various levels of tech-savviness

In addition to the general criteria, participants were also split into the following groups:

Existing users and non-users of Zoom
Users with cars and those without
Users who can drive and those who cannot

Interview insights.

“The challenge for me was the process it took, from registering, filling a form, accessing the car, getting the keys etc.”

— Anonymous

“I needed a car for a video shoot (to feature in the video shoot). I couldn’t get one so I had to change the theme of my video because I couldn’t get a car”

— Peter Adim

“The rental service I use still deals with cash, and it makes it hard. They still operate with a physical filing system in this age where everything is online”

— Esther Michaels