First of all let me hit you with some negativity at the top: this does not exist yet. This is an innovation project that I’m going to talk about to show off because I think the process would be interesting for you hear about (and it looks pretty), but it’s a bit aspirational so don’t be too disappointed when we to get to the end and and the result isn’t widespread industry transformation.
I was brought into our new innovation team in early 2020 and this was our first major project. We were charged with putting together a proposal to improve the fuel buying experience that was worked out enough to get buy-in from other areas of the business and find a fuel forecourt partner to develop into a fully fledged app subsequently.
My first step was research. With a fairly open brief like that I wanted to build a picture of the petrol buying experience from start to finish and plot the irritations along the flow. I don’t drive and I have no desire to (People that can afford rent and a car in Dublin should be regarded with deep suspicion and excluded from any design survey you put out). We sent a survey out to establish this and I presented the findings in a word doc for the team and a glossy PDF for the higher ups.
After that we identified the biggest frustration in petrol stations involved the process of paying for fuel, so solving this issue was our first priority. The design team worked together, whiteboarding on Miro to come up with a first draft flow, starting out in plain english and building up to the wireframes you see below.
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Download WhiteboardOnce we reached where we felt the wireframes were developed enough we reviewed them with the rest of our stakeholders and gave everyone an opportunity to poke holes in our precious baby before moving on to a fully fleshed out visual design to present to the rest of the company. Here every member of the team could walk through the flow (the plan was to move onto full usertesting with users outside the team when we are developing the MVP later on). The full designs were worked through in sketch and then taken into principal for fancy UI animation (essential to any good pitch).
Big buy in and focus from the rest of the team, we were given the resources of a full product team (Devs/Product designers/UX designers) and a consultant was hired to help us build partnerships with forecourt operators in Ireland. A few months later we started a full app design process with a MVP version of the app expected to be on the market in summer 2021. Live trials are starting in a petrol station in Dundrum before the end of Q1. I continued to work on the team and designed the registration and onboarding flow in early 2021 before leaving the project.
