BMW’s Motorrad Club Visconteo Website experience

Role

UX research

Methods

Surveys, Interviews, Card Sorting, Affinity Mapping

Timeline

5 days

Project Goal

Identify areas of improvement in users' current BMW Motorrad Club Visconteo website experience and suggest new solutions based on our findings.

Solution

Create a Community dedicated page

Members can start conversations about specific topics
Exchange knowledge
Start new friendships based on niche interests

Tools

Miroo, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop

01 Project overview

What is BMW Motorrad Club Visconteo?

As part of a workshop for my Master's in UX Psychology, my team and I had the opportunity to work for Milan’s BMW Motorrad Club Visconteo. BMW Motorrad Club Visconteo is a non-profit association for motorbike owners with sporting, cultural and social purposes. With over 800 members, key benefits include trip packages, social gatherings, safety classes, discounts, and more.

02 Process

In this workshop, a design thinking approach was adopted. For the scope and this workshop's objective, there was a predominant focus on user research, hence more time was spent on the Empathize and Define phase.

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Deliver

03 Empathize

What kind of digital users are the members of the BMW Motorrad Club Visconteo?

By answering this research question, we aimed at understanding WHO our user is, WHY they are part of the club, and WHAT their current on and offline experience with the club is. More specifically, grasp their contexts, needs, and challenges. We developed an interview topic guide to address these points and conducted four hour-long interviews with different club members.

Interview participants were found through the Master's teaching staff and were asked to complete a brief survey before speaking to us. This gave us a general overview of the club members, their habits, and preferences which we then explored in detail during the interview.

04 Define

Following our interviews, my team and I organized a debriefing session during which we analyzed our participants' answers. We sorted our findings by Actions, Needs/Motivations, Feelings, Pain Points, and Opportunities.

From this research data, we channeled our insights into developing two personas, each reflecting the key goals and characteristics of the users we interviewed.

For the scope of this project, we decided to focus on the persona that gave us the most insights, here "the Historical Motorcyclist". We then proceeded with building a user journey map of his process of becoming a member of the BMW Club Visconteo.

Through journey mapping, we developed a structured visualization of the user's current experience through each interaction touchpoint with accompanying actions, needs, and feelings. We then isolated moments in the current journey where our users experienced negative feelings. This allowed us to pinpoint what the current problems were and where there was an opportunity to intervene.

Problem

From our user journey map, the most problematic moment for the “historical motorcyclist” persona occurred during the "Ongoing Membership" phase. Our persona's current experience did not satisfy their main need to quickly access information on historical motorcycles and bond with other members around this topic, leading to an overall lack of engagement and satisfaction within the club. We decided to focus on this problem by formulating the following "how might we" question:

How might we increase the historical motorcyclist's engagement in the club given his unmet need to access information on this topic and bond with members of similar interests?

05 Ideate

After identifying the problem, the next step was to gather ideas to feed into the design of a potential solution.

We came up a must-have idea-implementing a "Community" space-that would solve the current challenge identified, and two nice-to-have features, the "Personal Garage" and the "Members area" that would complement the main solution.

A sense of Community

The current website experience did not allow for having an online community. The only way to create relationships before joining the group tour rides was through whattsapp groups. This made it difficult for members like the historical motorcyclist to keep up with discussions, engage with others without overflowing the chats with unnecessary information, and access specific information promptly. Thus, to keep the historical motorcyclist engaged on the website, incorporating a sense of community could be of much value.

By implementing a dedicated Community page, members can:

Learn and exchange about diverse topics within the motorcycling world
Access tailored content with no time
Start Building friendships with people discussing about shared niche interests that can continue during the tour rides

Deliver

After discussing about the features that could be included with the Community page, we decided with the help of our UI designer in the team to create its' front page in computer format and some screens in phone format. This was a way put our ideas into visualization and helped the Motorrad Visconteo president to better picture how the community section could look in the existing website on computer or phone.

Then, we mapped out a customer journey to be, where in green appears the changes brought by those potential solutions.

Key takeaways

User research is the basis of UX design:

In this workshop, the research part was crucial as we had to dive into a very unfamiliar sector. We had to learn about the people in the motorcycling world, get as many insights as possible and interpret the meaning behind them. It was interesting to try stepping into their shoes for a moment while keeping an open mind in order to find designable solutions for them.

Team cohesion is essential for successful delivery:

In this workshop, I joined 3 new team members coming from various backgrounds. It was eye-opening to see how in such little time of knowing each other, we managed to complement each other skills efficiently and synced them into a positive end result.

Do not lose track:

This workshop's challenge was to develop solutions in such limited time frame. This made me learn the importance of prioritization. Sometimes, a trade-off had to be made in order to keep up with the pace and not lose focus. I definitely felt that my role within this workshop included helping the team not diverge too much and staying alert to our main objective.