Company
Automotive
B2B
200+ employees
$68m+ revenue
Munich
Retained UX and UI services
Since 2018 we’ve worked on a retained basis for Digital Charging Solutions (DCS). This major automotive business is in rapid scale up mode, expanding into new markets across the globe.
With a consumer facing product already in development, they wanted to expand on a business to business offering; ChargeNow for Business.
They knew demand was heavy for a tool with the unique features required by Fleet Managers.
Design sprint
Working up the ChargeNow for Business offering meant answering plenty of questions.
- What are the different use cases for fleet management?
- What are the complexities in managing a fleet of cars vs just one?
- How can we draw from existing fleet management products that provide fuel cards?
- Who are the existing competitors and how can the service be improved?
- What are the unique requirements of a driver in the fleet (i.e. charging vehicles at home and billing their company), and what will make the strongest experience for them?
To tackle them, we ran a three day design sprint with DCS and a partner near their Munich offices, armed with the findings of a short analysis phase to bring us up to speed on the existing marketplace.
By completely blocking out every participant’s calendar for this exercise, we were able to produce results that would have taken months more to develop alongside our normal schedules.
Digital product features
The sprint concluded with a presentation of our progress to the CEO, securing investment for an MVP build. Our first phase saw us fully scoping the tool, before creating prototypes and pushing forward into production.
With another 6 teams across QA, front-end, back-end and more involved, located all over Europe, it’s essential that we maintain a strict Agile workflow.
With complex projects of this type it’s important to stick to a framework of fortnightly sprints followed by sprint reviews, refinements and retrospectives. Anything else would end in a mess!
Blog post
Agile methodologies are great, but they’re not one size fits all. We discuss hitting the right balance of process and progress.
Read more
Continuous iteration means we’ve been kept busy rapidly wireframing, building out and pushing live features over the past two years of the product’s roadmap.
Extensible UI Kit
Extending the central ChargeNow design system, we created a UI kit that differentiated the tool for the new user persona.
It’s important that the B2B offering shares identifiable and coherent components and colour palette with the customer-facing product, but that the brand is able to be extended for different use cases.
Blog post
Lessons learned managing UX and UI design across multiple websites and apps – It’s harder than you’d think!
Find out more
The other DCS application we work on is a white-labelled service, and with a design system made to scale, the possibility of white labelling this platform in the future too is a breeze.
Marketing the product
With a beta release to a select few clients to test features and gain valuable feedback complete, it was time to market the platform to a wider audience.
The ChargeNow for Business team had a bold vision for onboarding Fleet Managers which differs from the industry status quo.
Our mission was to build a marketing and onboarding function that sells itself and means fleet managers can self-serve, selecting and purchasing the appropriate licence without having to contact the sales team.
As the product grows and evolves, we remain on hand to refine, test and rapidly push new features live.
