Mevo’s Internal Processes

Internal UX project for Mevo Carshare

Timeline

8 weeks

Team

Flynn, John, Kusal, Brittany

Year

2022

User

Mevo Mobility team

Client

Mevo is New Zealand’s leading car-sharing company with a mission to “create beautiful and more liveable cities by creating a better alternative to car ownership.”

Context

Challenge

As a start-up, Mevo had outgrown many existing internal processes. The Mobility team was most impacted by this in their day-to-day work.

We were tasked with learning how the Mobility team carried out their work, to shed light on how their processes could be improved. We would present these findings back to Mevo's Product team who would deliver internal solutions.

Key insight

Supervisors and Management use Supervision to find different information as Supervisors use it to carry out their shift specific tasks, whereas Management uses it to understand what is happening with the fleet. The functions of Supervision are not fit for purpose for Supervisors currently.

Supervisors

"There's a disconnect between Supervisor knowing what to do/knowing the plates, and being able to tell the Coordinators"

Head of Mobility

"The map on Supervision is the best, it’s much better than Fleet Manager"

As both an employee at Mevo and a participant in the university project I was responsible for stakeholder management throughout the project. Alongside John, I lead the qualitative research phase and the synthesis of generative research into insights. As a team, we participated in observational research to better understand the context. I collaborated on ideation with Kusal before he took the lead on the design phase.

Result

We delivered a set of four journey maps to the Product team, encapsulating the core processes of the Mobility team.

Approach

Reverse Brief

When we were presented with the brief, we realized the scale of the task Mevo had given us was huge. There was little existing documentation of the Mobility team's processes. In order to set clear expectations and manage our relationship with the stakeholders we collaborated on a reverse brief.

Alongside Mevo’s Product Designer, we created a research statement (or “How might we” question) as well as a list of research questions which acted as guides throughout the project. We also introduced milestones, which detailed key progress points across the 8 weeks.

“How might we improve the Mobility team’s internal processes to make them more efficient, replicable and scalable for Mevo as it continues to grow?”

Qualitative research

The lack of existing documentation meant the best approach to starting our research was head first, with observational research. Within the first week, we had all participated in a Mobility “shift”, and in the coming weeks, our team participated in one of each type of shift.

Next, we conducted interviews across the different roles within the team. John and I worked in a pair to carry out and transcribe the interviews. Working together ensured the interviews were consistent and that important topics were covered across the team.

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Synthesis

Through several sessions using affinity mapping we broke down the data into several themes. We created 11 in-depth insights. We all participated in this step, as we had all participated in some level of research.

During our research phase, we realised we needed to maintain the investment of the team and stakeholders. Once we finished gathering research and analysing it, we presented it back to the entire company. This was to get everyone up to speed with what we had found, as well as seek input from the wider Mevo team, not just the Product team before we moved into the solution space.

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Ideation

The intention behind our output was to document all the information we had captured over the course of this project in a succinct and clear way. We wanted to contextualize the data to show how it might improve the tasks carried out by the Mobility team.

We ideated by breaking down our research into components, and identifying how they related to a specific task, drawing a correlation between our insights and the process of each task.

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Result

At the start of the project, there was no existing documentation of Mobility team’s processes. Task prioritization and order were stored in the collective memory of the Mobility members. In order to honor the depth and breadth of our research we iterated on the idea of a process map.

Our findings identified points of friction within tasks. The intention of our output was that the Product team could easily identify steps in tasks that could be improved. The output was a set of task maps broken into 5 components. The scope was key tasks that the Mobility team carried out in their day-to-day.

It encapsulates relationships, app interactions, research insights and potential opportunities. For a member of the Product team, it bridges the knowledge gap and offers a resource of where to begin. It breaks issues into manageable chunks to be addressed in relation to a specific task.

Collaboration

As a team, we prioritized figuring out how we worked together. We honored each other's strengths and created space for everyone to communicate through stand-ups. This structure made a really great work dynamic, as well as ensuring the work was enjoyable for everyone.

We introduced weekly retrospectives which helped us identify what was working personally and as a team. I really enjoyed working with the team on this project, we all contributed different perspectives and were encouraging of one another.

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Learnings

By using mixed methods of research we were able to generate in-depth insights. By utilizing the whole team we covered a lot of ground quickly. This was invaluable as the scope of discovery was huge.

We engaged with stakeholders throughout the process. We defined clear milestones with the Product team and had bi-weekly progress meetings. By presenting our findings to the wider company we encouraged investment into the issues. This was an important part of our handover.

The breadth of research was so large that synthesis took a long time. We had to manage scope creep as there was so much opportunity from our analysis. Presenting our findings and gaining input from the wider team was a great way of managing this.

Although we believed we'd narrowed the scope with the reverse brief, covering 3 cities, various roles, and tasks blew out our research. This could have been narrowed by iterating on our research question after some preliminary research within the first two weeks.