As a part of a design challenge, I was asked to redesign the Enterprise Rent-A-Car website in 48 hours to make it easier for customers to use and improve it's overall look and feel.

View the original Enterprise Rent-A-Car website before the redesign.

Understanding Stakeholders:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car Staff

After receiving the design challenge I stopped at two Enterprise Rent-A-Car locations on my way home to ask employees if they ever had to field complaints related to the company website. Both locations indicated that they did not receive many complaints, but that individuals under 20 would often come in or call after briefly visiting the website without realizing that there are additional requirements necessary for this age group to rent a vehicle.

They also stated that customers frequently confused the site’s requirement of a “major credit card” with a debit card. They felt that this was because there is usually a Visa or MasterCard logo on debit cards, so that some individuals do not realize that their debit card is not the same as a credit card. This is a problem, because debit card users must bring in additional proof of residence and pay an additional deposit to rent a car, leading to dissatisfied customers and wasted Enterprise employee time.

Understanding Stakeholders:

Coffee Shop Usability Tests

Next, I recruited several friends to conduct in person usability tests of the enterprise website and screen-shared usability tests via Google Hangout with others long-distance. Before the tests, I asked the users how they would normally go about booking a car rental and how often they rented cars. Then I asked them to use the Enterprise site to book a rental for this weekend for the cheapest car possible using the talk-aloud approach.

Common Comments:

• The site looks outdated and unprofessional
• It has too much information on the screen at once
• A location map should be included after a search is initiated so that users unfamiliar with the area can see where the rental facility is
• Once users became aware that price discrepancies between many classes of vehicles were frequently small, the users often expressed that they would like to see all of the vehicle options at one time
• Several users said that “Kayak” was an excellent site for car rentals
• When users were exposed to several other car rental websites, they had a strong positive reaction to Hertz Rent-a-Car’s website

Objectives in Redesign

• Provide early feedback to users under 20 that there are additional rental requirements
• Make the type of payment card the user will be renting with salient to them, so that they are aware of any additional requirements for debit cards
• Simplify and update the site
• Include a location map
• Allow individuals to browse choices before narrowing search
• Extract best practices from Kayak and Hertz’s websites for use in the redesign

Initial Sketches

After gathering information from interviews, I developed a series of potential sketches for the layout of the rental car home screen and other important primary pages. I then showed these to other designer colleagues for their input as I refined my ideas.

Wireframes

After I refined my ideas through sketches and feedback, I penciled more detained wireframes. Here is a wireframe of the redesigned homescreen.

Wireframes

This is a wireframe of the redesigned main vehicle search page.

Left: Before Redesign: The main landing page

Elements are cluttered: User login occupies a large portion of the page, the deal ad has an inconsistent color pallette and a noisy background, and there is a large amount of information which users must specify before seeing a search result.

Right: After Redesign: The main landing page

The home screen is greatly simplified, with the long listing of categories at the bottom of the page collapsed into just a few categories. The screen is simple enough to be seen on large monitors and medium sized tablets and modular enough in its horizontal layout so that the mobile site could simply transform the horizontal elements into a single vertical column. I dispensed with the option of selecting a vehicle class right away because I found that most users seemed to like to browse and were surprised at how close different classifications of vehicles were for Enterprise. In fact, some users were angry when they found that “better vehicles” were just a few dollars more but that these vehicles were not shown to them when they selected a class initially.

After Redesign: The main landing page- User Login

The login feature occupied a tremendous amount of area on the original enterprise site. To take care of this, I made login a button, and the text area into a pop-up.

After Redesign: The main landing page- Under 20 Message

Users under 20 receive an immediate alert when they submit their information on the home screen instead of being notified several screens into the submission process.

Left: Before Redesign: Rental location selection: There is no map to show individuals unfamiliar with the area the location of their rental.

Right: After Redesign: Rental location selection

Many of the users stated that they wanted to see a map of the locations of rental agencies, because they would likely not be familiar with an area in which they would be renting a car. Accordingly, I have included a Google-style map that will likely seem familiar to many users for easy utility.

Left: Before Redesign: Vehicle Selection

In the current Enterprise site, information on the vehicle’s passenger and luggage limit are not included on the search result screen.

After Redesign: Vehicle Selection

I have added feedback in a hybrid borrowing from the best features of Hotwire, Kayak, and Hertz to present elements which will likely matter to travelers (luggage, passenger limit).

After Redesign: Vehicle Selection- Class Drop-Down

Users who know exactly the class of vehicle they want can still quickly access this feature on a dropdown menu for a rapid search.

After Redesign: Vehicle Selection- Additional Vehicle Information

On the original Enterprise website, user had to click on a vehicle to see additional information, which prevented rapid browsing. I would replace this with hide and reveal JavaScript, so that users could quickly compare detailed pricing and features on the same screen with other vehicles.

Left: Before Redesign: Payment Screen

Right: After Redesign: Payment Screen

This is the final form that the user fills out to reserve a vehicle. Because of the feedback from Enterprise employees, I added an alert for users when they select their payment options.

After Redesign: Payment Screen- Credit Alert Dialog

When users select “credit card” a pop-up appears to passively hint for users to make sure they are using a credit card and not a debit card.

After Redesign: Payment Screen- Credit Alert Dialog

When the user selects “debit card,” “check,” or “money order” a pop-up appears providing them with additional instructions for documentation they will need when they come to the Enterprise office to pick up their car.