Learn to Drive App
Overview
When I joined the Drive Go project, the app had been live for about a year and Waka Kotahi wasn't seeing the engagement they had expected in their app. Only 5% of their userbase had ever used the product to go on a drive (the core UPS of our product). Waka Kotahi believed in their product features and had a goal to raise this statistic to 25% of users by the end of the year.
Teenagers are utilizing the Drive Go feature primarily as a theoretical knowledge resource, rather than for practical skill-building through driving. How can we make the core purpose of the app more visible to our users?
The process
To better understand our target audience's learning styles and habits, and specifically how young males were currently learning to drive with their parents, we utilized a range of research techniques. Through online surveys and one-on-one interviews, we gained qualitative insights into our audience and learned more about what teenagers think about learning to drive. Our goal was to address the following problem statements based on our research:
- Users feel lost when using the app and struggle to find features to help them on their learning journey.
- Users have a lack of understanding around achievements and milestones in Drive Go.
- Users feel that using the app to track a drive requires substantial effort.
Using both our quantitative app data and our qualitative customer research on our demographic we discovered that young male drivers were goal-oriented and wanted to clearly see their progress, so we visualised their movement through the app as progressing along a road.Being rewarded early was key to keeping them engaged so we stacked the rewards upfront to incentivise repeat use and created a complete set of award badges referencing pop culture with a New Zealand flare. We then streamlined the system for how they rated their skills after each drive, making it more intuitive. We began ideating concepts and designs with alongside our targent audience via surveys, zoom calls and focus groups in schools.
The solution
In 2022, a new and improved R2.0 version of the app was released with a new direction, based on our research findings. The main discovery was that users didn't understand the purpose behind a drive, which led us to completely revamp the app's strategy and gamification design. The goal was to provide users with a simplified progression journey to encourage users to go on drives to progress through the milestones in the app.
