Wrenchers - An app for DIY car enthusiasts
Wrenchers is an educational service that provides Do-It-Yourself car owners with the skills, parts & tools they need to keep their cars running & on the road. This Design project was my thesis while studying for my MFA in Design at Stanford University.
Design Lead, UX/UI Designer, Front-End Developer, Branding Designer
2015-2016
The Problem
For Businesses – The DIY automotive aftermarket is a $51B industry in the U.S., and it is a complete mess. To accomplish a single DIY task, an average person may visit anywhere from 5 – 30 different sources
For Car Enthusiasts – Getting over the initial hurdles of a DIY task can be super daunting. The Technical complexity is high, the research costs are expensive, and the end-to-end process can be very long.
Early Concepts & Ideas
Our goal for the early concepts was to better understand the particulars of the DIY automotive experience. We prototyped and tested a number of early concepts. These concepts were mixed with ongoing exploratory design research. Over the course of about two months we ran 10+ design interventions and tested iterative concepts. The three most concrete concepts we tested were Car Camp, Telementor, and Mentor On-Demand.
Telementor: A concept that tested a connecting an expert mechanic mentor and a novice trying to accomplish a task. The whole experience happens over facetime on the phone.
Insights: There was an ergonomics problem around using the phone while working on a car. there was a sourcing problem in finding good quality mechanics who would be willing to get on the phone to help people.
Car Camp was a concept that tested out 1-day classes for basic vehicle maintenance. We hosted 5 novices, and provided them with an expert mechanic/teacher.
Insights: The Car Camp concept was the most solid in execution, but it wasn’t a new and novel concept, and it was a TON of work to orchestrate the operations of the course.
Mentor On-Demand was a concept that paired novice DIYers with an expert mechanic in an in-person setting. An expert would come meet with the novice, and they would accomplish a task on their car.
Insights: This concept suffered from the same sourcing problem of getting good experts, and also had a large cost for scheduling meetings.
Our Aha! Moment
The early concepts for Wrenchers were revealing for two reasons. One is that they showed us how high the complexity and orchestration of a in-person service would be, and they showed us the steep curve of our novice DIYers who were trying to learn. Our early concept participants helped us form our biggest insight: A beginner doesn’t just need to learn the task on their car. They need to “learn how to learn” about their car.
When we reframed our focus to helping people learn the critical thinking skill necessary to size up a problem, our product also shifted away from a in-person service toward a digital tool.
We asked ourselves:
How might we help DIYers be better at tracking their information, parts, and tools when taking on a job?
UX Design – Custom Automotive tutorials
The UX design of the tutorials help DIYers in 2 primary ways. 1) The lesson structure of the tutorials is broken down and formalized into it’s component parts of “Overview, How To, and Part’s & Tools.” 2) The lessons aggregate information from different web sources, which unifies the search for information.
Seen below are wireframes of the automotive tutorial experience
User Interface Design
The UI design was optimized for a one handed paging effect. Allowing a DIYer to flip through the content while perhaps holding a flashlight or a wrench in their other hand.
