GEICO SafetyPatrolinfo.com Case Study
Introduction
What is SafetyPatrolinfo.com? . . . Better yet, what is a safety patrol? DOTs and Turnpikes all across the country offer this service to struggling or stranded motorists along busy sections of major highways in the form of safety patrol vehicles. These vehicles offer various services, ranging from tire changes, to fuel and emergency support, and so on. These programs sometimes accept funds in the form of public/private sponsorships organized by third party marketing/consulting agencies.
Presently GEICO is the sponsor of many of these patrols and in order to ensure the highest quality service to motorists, they needed an online survey site in order to collect feedback from assisted motorists (www.SafetyPatrolinfo.com). Prior to GEICO’s sponsorship of these programs, State Farm was the sponsor and provided the survey site themselves. As GEICO came on to take over the program, I was asked to work alongside developers to design a whole new site for them. It was not only imperative to ensure this survey site followed GEICO’s brand guidelines, but that it echoed no remnants of State Farm’s pre-existing site as to ensure no legal repercussions. So how might we create a fast, efficient, GEICO branded survey site for motorists receiving patrol assistance on the side of the road?
Project Type:
2021 6 week client project
Team Members:
2 developers
Role:
Lead UX/UI Designer/Researcher
Tools:
Adobe Photoshop
The Challenge
GEICO needs a fast, efficient online survey site for motorists assisted by safety patrols that is not only GEICO branded, but that is entirely unfamiliar to the previous State Farm Safety Patrol survey site.
My Role
I was in charge of the entire design process from start to finish. I took directives from the client and other key stakeholders while working alongside 2 developers to ensure my designs presented and functioned properly.
The Results/Final Design
To Provide a Little More Context…
Some of the services provided by the Safety Patrols include (but are not limited to):
Changing Flat Tires
Providing Fuel
Jump Starting Vehicles
Emergency Response
Minor Mechanical Fixes
Roadway Debris removal
Bumps in the Road
Right off the bat, this wasn’t a typical UX project. I had six weeks to pull this survey site together with limited means of conducting research and no ability or time to perform user testing. In other words, I just had to roll with it.
Limited Research Capabilities
No Usability Testing
How I Responded
When you don’t have the capacity to conduct research or speak with users, your best alternative is to pull from your existing knowledge.
You have to generate an understanding of the service and empathize with how the users are most likely to interact with it based on their needs.
My Existing Knowledge:
Many surveys are conducted on iPads while service operators are attending to the vehicle
The vast majority of patrol assists are changing flat tires
Changing a flat tire takes approximately 15 minutes
The longer patrol operators/motorists spend on the side of the road, the greater the likelihood of an accident
My Research:
I utilized GEICO’s brand guidelines and scoured the web, looking for trends in GEICO’s digital brand representation for which to emulate
I performed heuristics on the existing State Farm survey site:
No display of system status (users don’t know how many questions are left to finish the survey)
Survey components are too tiny and with too many drop-downs for touch screen operating
GEICO Web Elements
These are some web elements from GEICO’s various web pages I ensured to utilize in my designs to achieve a cohesive brand display for the survey site.
My Designs
With the use of colors, shape, imagery, and Martin (the gecko), I was able to capture GEICO’s digital brand presence and generate their survey site from scratch.
Speed & Ease of Use
I designed this survey to be fast and touchscreen friendly. With the majority of assists taking approximately 15 minutes, I knew it would be ideal to create a survey that could easily be completed in that time, from inside the vehicle on an iPad, thus allowing both motorist and patrol operator the ability to get back on their way safely as soon as possible.
I designed a progress bar to let users know how many questions they have left to finish the survey in order to reduce any potential drop-off. I designed buttons instead of drop-downs (State Farm’s initial designs) in order to facilitate greater touchscreen usability and speed. I also incorporated slide bars for rating service and satisfaction. Lastly, I intentionally designed this survey to progress one question at a time, eliminating the need for scrolling and potential missclicks.
Finished Product/ Live Site
Reflections
This wasn’t a typical UX project. I was the only designer and under a tight deadline with limited means of performing research and no opportunities or time for usability testing. This was a heavily UI focused project as I had to spend copious amounts of time combing through GEICO’s various other web pages and extracting little details by which to carry over to the new survey site. The brand guidelines they provided were extremely limited, mainly focusing on just font families and color. Suffice to say, this project came with plenty of challenges, but instead of focusing on the areas in which I was limited, I immediately began pulling from the resources I did have.
Fortunately, I had extensive knowledge of the patrol having worked to help create these public/private sponsorship opportunities for my company over the years. I had read hundreds upon hundreds of motorist reviews recounting their tales of rescue thanks to sponsored safety service patrols. From this information, I was able to make some safe assumptions and combined with my heuristic analyses of State Farm’s existing survey site (that GEICO’s site would replace) I had a solid basis by which to start designing.
I was able to meet the required deadline, finishing the project in six weeks for the site to go live in time for the first GEICO sponsored patrol launch. GEICO, was very pleased with the end result and had only one suggested change which was to incorporate a motorist review carousel at the very bottom of the landing page.