Carminga

4 min readMay 4, 2022

Case Study - Reshaping the onboarding and booking process for a German mobility startup

Overview

Booking cars is no longer an alternative only for travels and short trips, the subscription car industry came to flexibilize the car model and the relationship with cars. Is cheaper and easier to sign up for a car monthly or annually than buy one.

Carminga came to this revolution. Born in Germany, where cars are part of culture, the company started as an idea to facilitate the process of booking a car. You can sign up for a car model and in a couple of days the vehicle is available at your door.

In 2021 I was invited to reshape the booking and onboarding process, and create a new Design System for Carminga’s platform, the big challenge — facilitate the way as the user creates an account and books a car.

What I did

User Research
UI/UX design
A new Design System

03 big steps

Identify opportunities
Applying the solutions
Creating a new Design System

01 Identify opportunities

Helping to understand the process

The first act I did in the product was a desk research focus on the competitors to understand the process of booking a car. Since the beginning we have in mind an onboarding chronological order, but our challenge was to make the process easier and clear.

The user in mind

To help Carminga to build its digital product experiences, I helped first to understand their audience. I ran a survey with regular customers to trace a user profile.

We wanted to know: Who is the user? Why do they use it? How do they use it? We could discover the main user behavior characteristics, the main motivations and user context situations. From demographic segments to desires, by understanding the user’s needs we can build a better product experience.

Problems discovery

With the user profile on hand we discovered problems in the actual product. The main profile is foregin people who want to stay a long period in Germany and need to use a car, but don’t want to buy one.The process of booking a car sometimes occurs in airports or train stations with poor internet connection. So the mobile application must be clear and fast, people need to book cars without friction.

02. Applying the solutions

From Idea to execution

Once we’d discovered the problems we started to apply the solutions, I drafted a new vision for the customer journey intricately detailed in prototypes, and validated the ideas with usability tests with the Maze app. One of them was to show step by step the onboarding and the booking process, so I designed a track bar to tell the user on which step it is on the process.

03 Creating a new Design System

Consistency in all touchpoints

To address the challenge of keeping consistent design across all of the different touchpoints, we found a great opportunity with Carminga to build a new design system. I started designing the design tokens, basic interface structure, such as colors, shadows and typography. Then I divided it into two different breakpoints, web and mobile.

Fast at scale

The design system challenge also creates an opportunity to be faster on development, and create a good scale for all Carminga’s products. For that, I designed in Figma, using design styles, components and variants. This creates a better way to test things faster, just a few clicks we can be able to change an entire layout. The maximum here was, test fast to fail fast and learn fast.