GM Maven is a car-sharing service aiming to provide a seamless short-term rental experience. The service loans GM cars for a few hours at a time to simplify the car rental experience. The entirety of the ordering system is in a mobile application, which shows the user where their nearest car is, rates of the cars, and allows users to reserve and unlock cars. Our industry sponsor, GM, already has the service up and running in multiple cities. Our group’s goal was to find a way to distinguish Maven from other car sharing applications and to provide a unique and exciting experience for the customers. This could be anything from improvements to the application to changing the way the service is run.
Our mission is to find the pain points of people who utilize car sharing services and have Maven solve those pain points. The mission statement was to provide a seamless car riding experience for the user.
Design Process
We started interviewing classmates and young professionals that currently used car sharing services. We conducted both in person interviews as well as an online survey. After identifying the top 5 key user needs and how they aligned to our sponsor’s goals, we started expanding and coming up with a huge list of ideas (included in the appendix) that would meet those goals and needs. Having that list of ideas allowed us to narrow down all the ideas into 5 top choices which we later merged and further refined by concept selection and ranking processes. The whole team worked together to identify the areas that would most suit our project in terms of implementation and impact. Along the way, we created a low fidelity prototype and communicated with GM representatives to further refine our model. Finally, after working out more details and homing in on what the final product should look like, we went ahead and created an App mockup that simulated the real app experience on a phone.
Simulated Mobile Prototypes
- GM MAVEN_Mock-up 1. Rating System
- GM MAVEN_Mock-up 2. Rewards System
(Excerpted from Spring 2017 GM: Maven Team, ME110, UC Berkeley)