Skurt was a Los Angeles-based rental car delivery startup, which has raised over $10 million in Series A funding and has since being acquired by Fair.com.
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The founding team at Skurt approached me to design a web application to be distributed to their partner vendors (including clients such as Hertz, Avis & Enterprise) and would allow them to receive reservations from Skurt’s customers in real time. Skurt would then collect the vehicle from the vendor and deliver it directly to the customer and collect it once they were done.
Through the app, the vendor needed to be able to see where their vehicles were at all times, recall them if necessary, view the vehicles rental history, as well as perform various other actions like track issues with the vehicle and request maintenance. On top of this, the vendors could also request the transfer of a single vehicle or multiple at once, from one location to another.
With the main requirement for the app outlined, I started sketching different user journeys on paper and exploring different potential layouts that would allow me to cater for each of the main requirements of the app.
The main challenge was to design an interface that could facilitate relatively detailed and complex actions, such as being able to select multiple vehicles on a map and move all those vehicles to another selected location on the map. This required some complex interactions and I needed to make sure I planned the basic layout well enough to accommodate for these interactions.
I completed a competitor analysis of other applications which had requirements to carry out complex interactions on maps and relied heavily on a visual map layout. I continued to sketch ideas on paper exploring a variety of layouts and getting an idea of how it might come together before settling on any one particular layout.
Once I’d arrived at a layout I felt could accommodate the main requirements of the application, I started to create some rough wireframes for each of the views within the application with a list of requirements for each. I was then able to plan the overall IA (information architecture) for the application and communicate it back to the team at Skurt and get some feedback and create a dialogue with the product team there.
