Avis approached us wanting to re-design their website to reflect their position as a market leader, and the quality of their offering, services and innovation.
The company prides itself in providing a high degree of care to their customers, from the management of their fleet (ensuring all cars are less than 9 months old) to the way they provide convenient and innovative approaches to car rental that allow their loyalty program customers to rock up and drive off without waiting in line.
We approached the task by questioning where the gaps were between the real world experience and the online counterpart, where the industry as a whole was failing customers and how we could make the AVIS brand stand out from the competition.
We started the project with a quick iteration process, coming up with a digital design language for the brand and prototyping ideas in the matter of days that were then extensively user tested across 5 key markets.
From the user tested results we were able to design a quick overview of where we wanted the project to go, to define the overarching experience and lay down a roadmap, allowing us to work in an agile process for the rest of the project.
With one sprint to go, we encouraged the client to invest in one final round of testing. We used the testing to validate not just what we both us and the client knew was wrong with the current experience, but also some ideas that while easy in execution, and from our point of view low hanging fruit, were not proving very popular with the client. The use of large up to scale images in car listings for example, at detriment of seeing a wider portion of the fleet, proved incredibly popular with users.
The website was launched around 4 months after the beginning of the projects, and bar a few A/B tested iterations is still live, having has a considerable impact on the perception of the brand, the proposition and the sales. Since launch it has also been rolled out beyond the 5 initial key markets to the whole of Europe.
