Flexible London Car Sharing

Ford GoDrive

Ford GoDrive is part of a number of international experiments to uncover new, sustainable business models (Flexible use and ownership) for the automotive industry known as the Ford Smart Mobility Plan.

Ford GoDrive is London's latest pay-by-the-minute car sharing app service.

“Ford’s ‘GoDrive’ service is like Boris Bikes for cars”

Buying a car could soon be a thing of the past, and Ford is desperate to find what’s next.

Iteratively moving forward

My role was to lead an established but small team and mature the existing GoDrive product, design new features, validate and measure success to drive growth and acquisition for the GoDrive pay-as-you-go car sharing service.

By taking a more customer centric approach, interviewing customers and stakeholders of the business, we were able to redefine their GoDrive service proposition and improve a number of areas across the app

Engagement areas

  • Service proposition and website design
  • Android app design and iconography
  • Designing new features – Refer a friend
  • Validating and measuring success
  • Advising the client on measuring success
  • Advising to prioritise backlog items
  • Driving impact for the Ford account

Android app design

I led the product design team to design and roll out the Android app, whilst also redesigning the icon pins for GoDrive map.​

Website design / messaging

Design lead, running design critiques and defining product proposition and messaging for the Ford GoDrive website.

Designing new features
User acquisition - Refer a friend

Finding the best and most opportunistic times to surface refer a friend to users to drive user acquisition.

Opportunities to show refer a friend

After the 1st completed drive
The first drive for a new customer is an exciting time, feeling accomplished. We should surface refer a friend at this point as people are more likely to share in a positive frame of mind.

Opening the app for a 2nd time (2nd session)
If a user is coming back to the app, this is an indicator that the user wants to use the app again and more likely to share. Upon reopening the app we show the user an overlay to refer a friend, incentivising them to earn money for you and your friend.

Refer from the side menu
To allow users to refer a friend instantly, the option is always available from the menu.

Assumptions

  1. Showing this screen after a successful drive, will encourage users to refer a friend.
  2. By not allowing a user to easily close the screen will encourage users to refer a friend.
  3. Incentivising users encourage more referrals
  4. Seeing this interstitial 2 times will get that same user to share more often.

Are our assumption correct?

  1. How many users are seeing this overlay?
  2. How many users instantly share?
  3. How many users share via other apps?
  4. How many users tap ‘Back’?
  5. How many new users are joining via those instant share channels?
  6. How many users are signing up via invite codes (Shows our incentive is working)?

GoDrive proved to be a highly successful service design experiment as part of the Ford ‘Smart Mobility Plan’.

From its initial base of 100 beta registered users, GoDrive grew to over 2,500 customers with over 20 GoDrive locations across London - and it generated data from over 35,000 journeys in the first twelve months. Leading to further expansion across the US.

© David Standen