Karhoo, a start-up of Groupe Renault, is an aggregator for mobility data and works as a B2B2C service. It enables brands to offer mobility solutions to complement end-to-end journeys. This showcase isn’t really a single case study but rather a few to give some insight into the variety of projects I worked on here.

With my previous background in mobility and mapping, Karhoo gave me the chance to build an entire service, combining internal and consumer-facing products to deliver mobility experiences for clients of train companies, airlines, hospitals, corporate traveling, and even carpooling solutions to complement metro rides in Paris. My job at Karhoo was to build up a team and to develop a UX framework and later on an entire design system across all platforms and projects which Karhoo had on offer.

Understand where to send your fleets

How can we help fleet managers to understand where to send their fleets and how to get the pricing right? To answer this question we built a data visualization platform in order to help mobility providers to understand where mobility demand is currently high or might be high and to adjust its pricing.

It shows the managers where to send their fleets in order to service the right areas for taxis or other forms of mobility. I worked on this project with one product manager/owner, data scientists, a developer, and one other product designer.

Together with our product manager, I facilitated a workshop to identify our target group and the jobs this decision tool has to fulfill. Together with product/business, technology, and the data science team at Karhoo, we ran this workshop online with the help of Miro, due to the distributed nature of the team which was based in Belarus, Paris, London, and New York.

While the product manager provided a clear framing with success metrics, constraints and timelines, and what was to achieve as a business I tried to re-frame this view and focus on who might care about what we do. I facilitated a reflection on the different target groups and we collected and reviewed all the information we had in place. As a group, we decided to focus on fleet managers, with the assumption that they would be most interested in our data, as our product manager was in close conversation with those fleet managers.

I facilitated a brainstorming to understand the variety of problems we could solve for those fleet managers with our data. With the clear product framing, we received from our product manager and together with the information we had in place, we decided in this workshop to help fleet product managers to increase the number of bookings possible in their fleet.

How might we help a fleet product manager
to increase the amount of bookings possible in their fleet?

As a result of this workshop, I created a wireframe which I then turned into a storyboard/ prototype which was based around a map indicating where demand for taxis was high/ low. This was the suggestion of our principle engineer. And while we had many ideas, based on what we knew about our target audience, what problem we were trying to solve for them, as well as the product framing described earlier, this seemed to be the best solution for us.

After our first workshops, we had a few follow-up sessions and I iterated with the team around individual features. As an example, I wireframed different ideas around how we could include the aspect of time in this data portal. Time seemed to be a crucial aspect to understand how demand in a certain area developed in the past and how it might behave in the future. I conducted a couple of remote user tests with a tool called usertesting.com.

A lot of this project fell under restrictions set by a corona lockdown in the UK and online testing seemed to be the best source of insights for us. I conducted trials with userlytics.com, pingpong.com and I had conversations with agencies who might have been able to help us. Usertesting.com in the end seemed to be the best tool for our needs and my capabilities at this time.

From here onwards, Matthieu, as a part of the design team, started working on a variety of features and helped me work out visual details for a range of features.

I encouraged him when iterating on features, to always try different variations, which I then could embed as variations in prototypes and test in our online account via usertesting.com,  embedded in more holistic user journeys and use cases.

Was it a success?

We built and released the data portal to fleet managers and evaluated tons of videos of qualitative research with our online research account. We invited those fleet managers also in a more focussed online study to a private panel, a feature usertesting.com provided to us. In the 5 final user tests we conducted, 7 out of 10 users in the worst result and 9 out of 10 users as the best result, understood our proposition and considered it as very useful or useful. At the time of writing this article, it was not possible to make statements about its impact on business.

However, due to Covid-19, we can make real impacts on the business KPI’s at this stage, due to lockdowns in most of Europe and drastically reduced traffic. This will hopefully have changed dramatically by the time you read these lines.

A white label mobility app for web & mobile

The following part of this case study focuses on the consumer-facing part of Karhoo. A white label app, which follows as a B2B2C approach. We worked with external clients and their users and provided an off the shelf mobility solution, which can be used to complete end-to-end journeys.

Bring people from door to door

Here the explainer video from the Karhoo website, developed by the Karhoo Marketing team:

Karhoo Traveller Booker from Karhoo on Vimeo.

The Challenge

Initial research on the project had shown there was a need in the market for mobility providers such as train companies, airlines, or booking platforms to offer integrated door to door journeys, which we enabled with our booking software.

My Role

I led the re-design of a framework for this white label app and collaborated with one other designer on the quotes display.
In addition, I worked alongside 2 Product Managers. I stopped working on the project during the detailed visual design phase as the app started to be built.

I defined the user journey between the white label app and our partner apps.

I  then broke down this user journey for every platform to make sure the information architecture is a consistent one between our white-label apps and our brand partners. I did this for all platforms to make sure the end-user has a familiar experience which I assumed increased the usability.

I often created simplified schematics of flows to discuss them with stakeholders.

I then specified every single step of the web app.

I started to apply the design system which I had been working on in parallel with one other designer.

Web UI kit and UX framework 

Mobile SDK

At the same time, I added components to our UI kit for our Mobile SDK.  Just like the mobile white-label app, our mobile SDK can be added to existing apps of brand partners.

Just like one web, I specified the mobile app.

This time, however, I moved quicker to prototyping. I used Framer and applied our ui kit, previously developed for the mobile sdk.

I created several prototypes for the white label app, having different clients in mind, such as airlines, hotels, etc. I conducted simple usability tests in this context.

The goal of this project was to increase the numbers of our brand partners and to reduce the time it took to create solutions for them.
This had ultimately a very positive impact on the number of rides, booked via Karhoo’s exchange platform.