Recreogo
The Challenge
We were tasked with finding the pain points and opportunity areas within the Recreogo website. This included both the business side for managing their inventory listings, along with the rental customer journey.
The Process
Cognitive walkthrough of website
Contextual interviews with users
Synthesize data to create a plan
Prototype mockups of proposed changes
The Solution
We decided to improve the rental customer experience of using Recreogo by better aligning the searching and booking functions with the mental model rental customers have of online shopping.
Cognitive Walkthrough
We began by performing a cognitive walkthrough of Recreogo's website in order to better understand the ins and outs of using the website from both the business and rental customer side. Deliberately going through every step in the process provided us with valuable insight as to which stages in might prove to be the most difficult for users.
Beginning to summarize our interview findings
Contextual Interviews
With this information in mind, we conducted contextual interviews with business owners who have been using Recreogo to manage their rentals. During these interviews, we discovered that only around 10% of the equipment they rent out is booked by customers via Recreogo. Further inquiry revealed that many of those rental customers found the process so difficult that they gave up on using the website and resorted to calling the store to make a reservation.
Recommendations Plan
We decided to focus our efforts on streamlining and simplifying the rental process for customers based on the data we had acquired. To accomplish this, we would reduce the total number of steps while increasing the clarity for the user at each stage in the process. Adding options to sort and filter the search results was one of the methods we proposed to accomplish this goal. Another suggestion was to change the visual hierarchy of the information each search result would display, such that users could easily see and compare the prices at a glance.
Partial prototype incorporating the recommendations
Prototyping
Our next step, now that we had a plan of how we wanted to proceed, was to create an interactive prototype using InVision. For this, other e-commerce or rental websites were used as reference for a general guide for the layout, as well as what information should be displayed at which stage in the process. By more closely matching Recreogo to these other familiar websites, rental customers would be much less likely to become frustrated or confused and subsequently abandon the online reservation process.