During the summer of 2021, I participated in an internship program with Ann Arbor SPARK (a local economic development nonprofit) in which they paired students and recent graduates with (mostly local) startups. I got to work with GreenRoute, a startup founded by a team of automotive industry experts working on a routing algorithm that finds the most energy-efficient routes for the user's specific vehicle based on factors including drivetrain data and current traffic conditions, with electric vehicle (EV) owners being the primary target users. My internship began just as they were about to begin a pilot launch of their flagship app in partnership with DTE Energy.
Project Overview
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Client name: GreenRoute
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My roles: User research, digital marketing, UX design
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Tools/skills utilized: Forum reviews, mockup sketching (on paper and using Canva, GIMP, and Adobe Photoshop)
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The key problems to solve: What are the main concerns of electric vehicle drivers, and how can we address those in marketing messages? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the beta version of the app?
Research Findings & The Design Process
My fellow intern and I reported directly to the CTO, who had us start with looking up EV forums online to learn about what attracted people to EVs and what concerns owners and prospective buyers had about the practicality of owning them. I focused on searching for users who lived in Michigan, since our initial audience was specifically going to be EV owners who were also DTE customers.
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The most common worries people posted about were driving range (particularly when dealing with battery degradation in cold weather) and proximity/availability of chargers​
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We discussed our findings after a few days of research, and then began brainstorming online marketing messages based around three different ​ideas: environmental concerns, getting better battery range, and spending less time charging. At this time, we also created pages for GreenRoute on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and started generating and posting content, researching options for paid advertising (I focused on Facebook), and drafting plans for ad campaigns.
A few weeks into the internship, the beta version of the GreenRoute app became available, so we installed it and began evaluating the UI​.
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We both identified several issues with the app, including a screen size issue preventing users with smaller screens from being able to complete the setup process and insufficient route data being displayed on the main screen​
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I designed a solution for displaying route data without compromising the existing screen layout using an expanding info box
In mid July, the app went public on the Apple App Store and DTE sent out a code for free routes to customers who'd signed up for the EV Connections program. Approximately 50 users signed up within the first week. At this point, the CTO prompted us to come up with more marketing ideas, this time centered around the app's community features, which would let users compare their energy savings with each other.
After a few more weeks, we examined the user data we had so far and found that 27% of our users had not looked up any routes at all, and 22% had looked up at least one route but not gotten a 'Green' route (that is, a special route that's more efficient than the default, fastest route); of the latter group, 70% gave up after looking up their first route. This prompted us to think more about how we could increase user engagement.
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I mocked up an idea for a brief new user tutorial, highlighting the main features of the app and clarifying that not every route will have a 'Green' option​
Around this time, we also uncovered some significant technical issues with the navigation functionality, and it was decided that we'd put a hold on social media posts and wait to launch any paid ad campaigns until the app was in better shape. We spent the last few weeks of the program working more on our ad mockups so that they could be handed off to GreenRoute's graphic designer and posted once they we ready run the paid campaigns​.
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While I'm much more comfortable designing UIs than graphics, I was pretty proud of some of the ad mockups I made, and I looked forward to hopefully seeing more polished versions on GreenRoute's social media pages
My final drafts used official GreenRoute assets to fit in with their branding.
Finally, I generated mockups to simulate how my ads would look as actual Facebook posts.
Project Reflection
Outcome
The internship program ended a few weeks before GreenRoute was to hear back about the State of Michigan mobility grant they'd applied for (which they did end up getting!). Overall, it was a very positive learning experience for me, but I wished it could've gone on longer so that I could've conducted more usability studies on the app​ and worked more on changes to the UI. I was still glad to have finally gotten some private sector experience, and it taught me that real-life work isn't as linear or steadily paced as classroom work and helped me become more confident at working on projects independently with minimal input from teammates.
Challenges
While I'd played around with creating marketing material for some of my earlier projects in school, this was my first formal experience with it and my first time creating content that would potentially be used for actual public campaigns. I also worked on a few projects including several user surveys that we never ended up using, which was disappointing. I'd hoped to get to do more hands-on user research, but I'm still glad I got more practice writing surveys.