AAA Auto Club Android App
Building for a Native Audience
The AAA Auto Club of Southern California (ACE), wanted an android app to attract younger members and help current customers get more value from their memberships. While work on an iOS mobile app was well underway, ACE needed the expertise to design and build a native Android app tailored to the UX and HCI patterns that Android users were accustomed to. In addition, they lacked experience in developing for Android and needed guidance on best practices to build a mobile app that could scale over time.
Starting with Real Customer Feedback
From the start, the initiative kicked off with a series of tests focused on existing AAA customers on their Android devices. These were all done leveraging UserTesting’s suite of tools (which I had previously helped build) to verify that integrating native Android navigational elements and Google Material design would increase usability and engagement.
Tests ran on payment experiences, locating the user’s AAA membership card, finding gas nearby, travel, discounts, and more. After many hours of reviewing and synthesizing learnings from the tests, it was clear that creating native Android designs were well work the investment.
Going Full Google Material Design
In an effort to create a design system and reusable components for the Android app, we followed the Google Material Design guidelines to the letter. This also meant that designers on the ACE team could easily create new modules and assets as features and functionality in the app expanded.
Today on the Google Play store you can see the app has 4.6 stars with 17.3k reviews and over a million downloads.
An Auto Club that Invests in Art
What you may not know is that the Auto Club of Southern California has a museum and historians who curate a collection of art and artifacts dating back to the clubs founding in 1900. Along with historic signage, maps, and photographs are a collection of works by local artists. Many of these were for a magazine cover art program that began in 1928 that adorned Westways, their member magazine.
In addition to the work I completed for the Android app, the team and I decided to do something extra — creating art to be added to the collection.
The series of daytime and seasonal images shown here were combined into an interactive module that would accurately position the sun and moon with the season and time of day. It would have put too much extra load on the app to leverage as a loading screen, but it along with these designs were presented to the ACE team as a gift.
Android Influences on the Web
Inspired by the work I had done with AAA of Southern California for the Android Mobile App, AAA Northeast leveraged that same research and design thinking in a redesign of their website.
The main distinction in this website work was a focus on personalization and ease of navigation so that customers could better understand the offering available through their AAA membership. After months of additional research, design, and development this website launched March of 2017, leading to a 33%+ increase in revenue generated by the website.
Metrics showed us that these users were also purchasing a higher number of products and services, leading to both increased revenue and customer loyalty. Ultimately, users are able to find what they are looking for faster and the AAA brand was able to reconnect with their audience.