My Tesla
Purchasing a car can be as stressful as it is exciting. My Tesla aims to optimize the experience of purchasing a Tesla by making it totally user-centered. By enriching the Tesla customer journey, this project creates an immersive, engaging car buying experience that is both user-friendly and effortlessly sparks excitement. Crucially, the customer journey becomes a positive, memorable experience. These enhancements not only set Tesla apart in a competitive market flooded with electric vehicles but also reinforce the company's commitment to delivering exceptional value.
service design | UX design
November - December 2022
Timeline
Individual project completed during Carnegie Mellon University’s Product Design Innovation certificate
My Role
The Challenge
Innovating for the Future
It has become crucial for Tesla to maintain their position as pioneers in experience design innovation in an era where an increasing number of companies are introducing electric vehicles to the market. Not only does the project focus on engaging new audiences in a more profound manner through personalization and seamless tech integration, but it also aims to optimize the structure of the new website to enable Tesla to effectively capture leads by leveraging user-specific data.
The Concept
Three Steps to Success
My Tesla aims to maintain an edge over its competitors by adding a personalized car buying customer journey, revising the Tesla website UI, and by building out a “Compare Vehicles” feature.
User Testing
Starting with the User
A survey was conducted with the purpose of understanding public opinion of online retail and the automotive industry, and how it relates to Tesla’s current purchasing experience.
The research indicates that users highly value personalized in-personal experiences when considering a vehicle. However, upon reviewing typical car-buying experiences, it was observed that the experience needed to incorporate more customization and guidance into the flow to help users visualize their prospective vehicle. By integrating these elements, we can create a more user-friendly Tesla experience.
UX Audit
creating a more a More User-Friendly Experience
The revised UI provides a clear navigation menu for the customer to interact with. This UI improves upon important UX heuristics by implementing a ‘my carts’ section, and splitting out the products that Tesla offers into different categories, creating a hierarchical order for the user to navigate.
Existing Tesla UI
Proposed Tesla UI
UX Audit
ux heuristics
Visibility of system status: it would be helpful to have something equivalent to a "my cart" or "my cars" as a log of different cars that the customer has configured.
Recognition rather than recall: There is no obvious way to compare models. It would be helpful to the user to have a clear car spec comparison to minimize the user's memory load.
Help and documentation: it could help helpful to have a sticky button in the lower right hand corner that allows the customer to connect with a sales rep for help.
The re-design of the menu bar creates a clearer navigation system for the user. It splits out the products that Tesla offers into different categories, creating a hierarchical order for the user to navigate.
The UI for this project adopts Tesla’s branding standards. The fonts and general formatting speak not only to Tesla’ being a car company, but also emphasizes the fact that the cars they sell are high-end and high-tech.
Giving Agency to the User
comparing vehicles
The introduction of the Compare Vehicles allows users to compare car specs between Tesla models clearly and easily. This will aid in the customer purchasing and decision-making process.
User Survey
giving agency to the user
The customer begins their car-buying journey by filling out a quiz that polls their driving habits, like daily driving routine, whether or not they like to take road trips, and the number of passengers that would normally be in the car on a day-to-day basis. Based on the customer’s response, the Tesla website can rank their car models based on what the company thinks would be most suitable for the user’s needs. From this point, the customer can choose at least two vehicles to test drive and select the Tesla Experience Center that they would like to do this at.
User Survey
User Survey Results
Personalized Customer Journey
Customizing the Experience
Having completed the user survey, the customer is presented with two cars that Tesla thinks would most suit the customer. From this point, it is possible to schedule a test drive.
Prior to the test drive, the customer is able to let Tesla know where they would want to test drive their car, and what their preferences are for driver configuration. Tesla will use machine learning and AI to analyze the roads near the Service Center to optimize the driving experience based on the length of the drive, a mix of terrains and urban/rural contexts, and speed zones. Allowing the customer to customize their test drive ahead of time makes the anticipation phase of this experience more personalized and interactive.
Personalized Customer Journey
Reflecting on a Significant Experience
After the test drive, Tesla will send a text to your phone asking if you would like to leave any feedback about the car, the personalized journey, and your overall impression of the test drive. The immediate feedback and interaction between the customer and the business is a sign of a significant experience.
Personalized Customer Journey
Reflecting on a Significant Experience
After the test drive, Tesla will send a text to your phone asking if you would like to leave any feedback about the car, the personalized journey, and your overall impression of the test drive. The immediate feedback and interaction between the customer and the business is a sign of a significant experience.
Next Steps
Leveraging ai
At present, Tesla predominantly uses AI to create self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles constantly interpret images from sensors and machine vision cameras, then use that information to make decisions about what to do next. Autonomous vehicles use AI to understand and anticipate the next movements of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. This information helps the car to decide how to behave within a split second. Tesla’s advantage is that each car that it currently has on the road is helping feed information and data points back to Tesla’s HQ and train new autonomous cars.
Because Tesla already has such robust machine learning and AI resources, they could leverage these by using them to attract potential customers. First, they could use AI to recognize potential customers by seeing who spends most time on the website following a certain click pattern. After recognizing those web users who are most likely to order a car, Tesla could target them with additional advertising to encourage them to book a test drive or make a purchase. Additionally, Tesla could leverage their AI abilities to create the recommended test drive route mentioned above. It would be a really great personalized feature for the user to be able to pre-load a custom test drive route to the car they will be trying out ahead of their test drive experience.