Overview
Auto Service is a unique offering point that Canadian Tire can utilize to compete with other retail chains in Canada.
Therefore, our team chose the auto appointment booking process to conduct user research in order to identify pain points / opportunities, as well as coming up with recommendations that would improve user experience from the moment they visit the website to when they finish the appointment.
The Opportunity
Canadian Tire invests in user experience, and it shows when we tried to book an auto appointment on their website.
That being said, we still identified some areas for improvement throughout the process and came up with recommendations, which we think would play a key role in improving overall experience for the user and in turn will generate value for the company.
The Audience
Our team conducted 8 interviews, with participants ranging from 18 to 30 years of age who own street-legal automobiles. All participants were selected through a screener, and interviews were conducted using a moderator script.
Roles
We worked in a team of 4, where all of us were working in a progressive system with set deadlines each week to complete different milestones.
We share responsibilities equally among team members, with me working independently on competitive analysis, recruiting and conducting 2 user interviews. As a team, we came up with screener, moderator script, personas, journey map and delivered the final report.
The Process
The full report can be viewed here.
Each of us would conduct competitive analysis individually, identify key areas that we want to focus our research on.
As a team, we discussed and agreed that we wanted to focus on the auto service, specifically the auto appointment booking process, as we think that this is a unique service that can provide value to Canadian Tire compared to other competitors in the retail market.
The next step was to come up with a screener and moderator script in order to recruit participants and conduct interviews. We conducted 2 interviews individually, which totalled to 8 interviews as a team.
Data collected was analyzed and synthesized using affinity diagramming, resulting in a persona and journey map.
At the final stages of the project, we took an extensive look into the final journey map to identify pain points and opportunities, from which recommendations were suggested to the overall process.
Outcome and Lesson Learned
I have learnt that no matter how well the process was designed, there is always room for improvement. The more well designed the process was, the more critical I had to look in order to identify unmet needs. Personally, I enjoyed the challenge of looking into big corporations such as Canadian Tire, the area where it would have potentially been considered to have little room to improve.
I also realized the importance of making the end users to be co-creators of the process of improvement and to keep an open mind when it comes to user research, as it is easy for researchers to come in with an expert mindset and ignore the potential useful insight from participants.