Driving Change: The Car Share Economy

Car Next Door was Australia's peer-to-peer car sharing platform, on a mission to free people from the 'one car, one person' mentality. A friend and I were always on the lookout for causes that matched our values, and we eventually found one in the most unexpected way: a flyer in our mailbox.

Over the next 12 weeks we poured ourselves into refining the Car Next Door experience. Working from the outside shaped how we operated: every insight had to be earned firsthand, as customers, from real users, and from the market itself.

In the Drivers Seat

Before any formal research, we became customers. We signed up, booked cars, and completed trips with Car Next Door and each of its competitors.

We documented every step, from account creation to handing back the keys, producing customer journey maps and a library of screenshots and recordings across web and mobile. It kept our later analysis honest. It's hard to be precious about assumptions once you've personally fumbled through the real thing.

Driving Insights

We shadowed users through the full loop of finding, driving, and returning a borrowed car, ran usability tests on the digital experience, and scraped over 200 reviews from around the internet.

Through a fortunate connection, we also got our hands on a freshly minted industry report covering market performance, forecasts, and the competitive field. That report did a lot of quiet work; it told us which problems were worth solving first, and which were merely annoying.

Shifting Gears

Car Next Door's web app tested poorly across the board, so we made the call to replace it with a mobile first experience rather than patch it.

Most participants told us that once their account existed, they'd use Car Next Door exclusively on their phones. So the mobile experience became the product, and that's where our design effort went: fixing the interface and process issues our research had surfaced.

The Perfect Set of Wheels

Variety was Car Next Door's edge. GoGet, Hertz, and Flexicar ran uniform fleets, while Car Next Door's community supplied everything from daily drivers to vans and pet-friendly cars.

We designed home screen filters that put that variety to work: a daily driver for errands, a van for moving house, a car for a trip away with your mates. And because variety only exists if owners keep listing cars, we worked in-feed ads into the browsing experience as a supply acquisition strategy, pitching car ownership income to the people already renting.

A Double Edged Sword

Community sourced cars meant more variety, and far less control. Competitors could send a cleaning crew and run scheduled maintenance; Car Next Door had to design for trust instead.

Our cost-effective answer was a rating system holding both sides accountable, scoring vehicles on cleanliness, ease of use, accuracy of description, and operating condition. Owners also got a private reporting channel for flagging troublesome renters straight to customer service. Accountability, not a cleaning fleet, was the version of quality control this business could afford.

Information on Cruise Control

Car Next Door told users everything, everywhere, all at once. One test participant was so preoccupied processing it that they forgot a crucial step: locking the car.

That moment reframed information overload from an annoyance into a service risk. We practised progressive disclosure, surfacing contextual information only when the user needs it, and reworked the information architecture so the critical details were findable rather than buried.

Sweetening the Deal

We're not fans of cold outreach emails. So we sent the Car Next Door offices and investors a short film on a USB, delivered alongside two giant ten inch donuts.

The film introduced who we were and what we'd built. Our friends at My Donut Box handled the sweetener. Within a week, we were sitting in their Sydney office.

Watch the Film here.

A Worthwhile Ride

The first question in the room: "Do you guys send giant donuts to every company you try to pitch to?"

CEO Will Davies was surprised that two strangers had put this much time, effort, and money into his company with nothing asked in return, and no guarantee the work would ever see daylight. The team found the research insightful and put it to use in their own projects.

Car Next Door was later acquired by Uber and became Uber Carshare. I won't pretend the donuts did that. But backing a company that ended up worth acquiring still feels like decent judgment.

Parking Up

Everything in this story traces back to one letterbox flyer, which might make it the best performing letterbox drop in company history.

We got to back a mission we believed in, and the work found a real audience inside the company. Not bad for junk mail.