Vehicle
Registration
The first online platform for vehicle registration in Ontario.
Overview
This is an ongoing project for the Ontario government.
All vehicles driven on roads must be registered in Ontario, Canada.
We designed a responsive website from scratch to digitalize the whole registration process.
The MVP is estimated to be launched in October 2020.
Role
Information architecture
Med-fi to hi-fi prototype
Usability testing
Duration
June, 2019 to present
Tools
Figma
Balsamiq
Miro
Jira
Team
Casey Wu (me)
Lucia Hsieh
Problem
Dealers spend a large amount of time and effort licensing vehicles. They invest a lot of time doing the paperwork and travelling multiple times to ServiceOntario.
Solution
We designed a responsive website to allow dealers to license vehicles online.
User Research
In Ontario, 87% of vehicle registration and 68% of transfer of ownership are done by dealers. To understand their needs, we launched two types of user research.
Interviews (Qualitative): To understand how different types of dealers currently license vehicles on behalf of their customers.
12
interviewees
90
minutes per session
Survey (Quantitative): To validate whether the insights gained from qualitative research are statistically significant.
619
respondents
61%
small businesses with less than 5 employees
Problem Identification
We identify 3 challenges of licensing a vehicle for dealers.
ServiceOntario
Going to ServiceOntario to licence a vehicle is the only option right now. It is extremely time-consuming and offer bad in-person experience.
Paperwork
Incorrect or missing information is common in dealers' paperwork, which leads to repetitive work.
Fines
Some customers don't pay their fines before licencing. Dealers won't find it out until they submitted the paperwork. It results in delaying the licensing process.
Personas
Based on the result of user research, we created 5 personas to represent different users and their diverse needs.
User Journey
Vehicle registration involves many documents and restrictions. Before getting into prototyping, we need to figure out the logic behind the whole registration process first.
Click here to see the complete user journey schema in Miro.
Prototyping
We have 2 prototypes. A medium-fidelity Balsamiq prototype for the mobile version and a high-fidelity Figma prototype for the desktop version.
Home Page
This is the home page of the website.
It contains four main sections related to application management. The same four sections are also on the global navigation bar.
On the desktop version, we also show additional information such as "News" and work hours of the ServiceOntario location of the user's choice.
Application Process
We simplified the whole vehicle registration process into several questions.
Based on the user journey schema, the website will know the intention of users by their choices and then ask for the required documents.
Users don't need to know any of the rules of vehicle registration to finish the whole application process.
Uploading Documents
Documents will only be required when they are needed for the specific application.
Users can choose to browse or drag and drop a file to upload it.
Uploading Documents
Users can manage their applications. "Saved application" is for unfinished applications, "At ServiceOntario" is for applications that have been submitted, and "Order history" is for completed applications.
Usability Testing
We conducted 3 sessions of usability testing with 21 dealership organizations in one month. We tested both the mobile flows in Balsamiq and the desktop flows in Figma. Besides some minor changes, we found 5 main changes we need to conduct from users' feedback.
What I learned
-
Negotiation with stakeholders is very important to define the design limitations. While at the same time, the limitations are also negotiable.
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A user journey or schema help designers figure out the logic of the whole website. It is especially essential for application design with different conditions.
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A low fidelity prototype is more appropriate for the first round of usability testing because it makes users more comfortable of pointing out major problems.