TL;DR:
Responsive Redesign of AAA Carolinas’ store locator webapp. Researched, tested, designed & coded in less than 2 months. Completed circa December 2016.
Context:
AAA Carolinas had a heavily fragmented website. Rather than invest in staff to develop and manage different web tools internally, the club frequently opted to outsource needs to vendors. While this is often a cheaper means to get faster, high-quality development, it often leads to weaker UX as you’re forced to deliver a one-size-fits-all option to a unique business need. If not properly vetted, you can find yourself paying too much for a tool that doesn’t sufficiently meet your needs or improve your brand.
That’s where AAA Carolinas found themselves with their Store Locator. The club was using an expensive service that wasn’t delivering optimized, responsive webpages. Because of the poorly organized implementation, use was clunky and users frequently struggled to find what they were looking for.
When I voiced a desire to redesign the tool and my developer offered the ease of rebuilding it, our director jumped at the opportunity. The service was costing the company over $100,000 annually, and with a new annual contract on the horizon, he didn’t want to have to pay for another full year.
Process:
The club had some 40 stores throughout the Carolinas, but the services provided at a given store could vary: we had car care centers, insurance agents, or travel agents. Many, but not all, of our stores had two or even all three of those services. Additionally, we had approved providers of those services that were not “AAA” stores, but that we were required to include in our search functionality due to partnerships.
The existing tool was a bit tricky, often requiring users to perform searches within a single scope at a time. We wanted to loosen those restrictions a bit. We also planned to make the application fully responsive and matching the visuals to the rest of the AAA site – that we had just finished redesigning.
After some usability tests on the existing design to identify pain points, we started designing a new version. The design process took several iterations – we spent a good chunk of time debating how to handle the stores having multiple services, and how to mix the official AAA stores with the approved non-AAA stores. After each iteration came additional tests and reviews with stakeholders.
Though roundabout, we ultimately arrived at some simple but elegant tweaks to the old format that gave the Locator renewed life.
Given that this was a fast-paced project with just myself and a developer, I did all the research, design and CSS, while my developer wrote the HTML, PHP and Javascript code.
Result:
Ultimately, our tool was a success. In less than a month, myself and my one developer built a fully functional, integrated store locator tool that matched the existing website design, was fast, responsive, easy to use, and a substantial financial savings – over $100,000 a year.
Our approach was centered around usability, flexibility and extendability. We wanted to ensure that the design would work well in any context for any of the various use cases.
