Digital Media Final Project
Project Owner
5 Months
This project mainly describes and examines the purpose, opportunities, and necessity of developing an online electric vehicle buying website. Electric vehicle (EV) technology has advanced significantly over the past decade, and its adoption is widespread in most developed and developing countries. By implementing the 5 Stages of Design Thinking approach, the project will primarily focus on defining the user need for EV buying and providing achievable solutions that enable consumers to purchase or lease electric vehicles more conveniently and efficiently online. In addition, the project will also explore and apply relevant design methods to persuade more potential customers to buy EVs.
Over the past decade, electric vehicle (EV) technology has advanced quickly, and its adoption has grown dramatically in recent years. Since vehicle energy consumption has been growing fast and steadily, environmental issues like air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have become worse and worse across the globe. Although the emergence of electric vehicles has been seen as one of the most effective solutions to address a series of environmental and energy issues, our online research and the observational study revealed that the majority of the current online websites for the sale of vehicles are giving consumers few opportunities to comprehend and buy electric vehicles.
The primary goal of this project is to develop an online EV selling platform that helps users to buy or lease a brand new electric car more conveniently and entirely online. The platform aims to provide comprehensive E-vehicle buying customer service and practical functions to allow users to explore all popular EVs brands and models and access detailed EV information. The website also aims to assist users in finding available charging points and installing private home chargers.
Two user personas were created in this project to identify two different user profiles with distinct patterns and needs. The first user persona was created to target potential users who have never purchased an electric vehicle before, and want to purchase their first electric vehicle online. The second user persona targets users who have previous vehicle buying experience and they want to purchase a new electric vehicle through a reliable and useful platform.
Two customer journey maps were created in this project to understand how customers purchase their electric vehicles online for the first time.
POV 1: Thomas Jeffery, a professional programmer, needs to find out more about electric
vehicles in order to purchase a new EV safely, because he has no experience of vehicle buying and wants to find a reliable platform that provides comprehensive and safe buying customer services.
POV 2: Jennifer Law, a very busy mother and visual designer, needs to purchase an electric SUV for her family, because her children is getting older and she wants to find an online website that
helps her to purchase an EV conveniently.
Rapid idea generation is a simple method for generating as many ideas as possible from a single challenge question. Participants in this study were asked to provide ideas by answering questions such as "what would Google do?" and "what would Instagram do?" , as well as "What would Elon Musk do?" .
The main deliverable in this project is the high-fidelity prototype created on Figma platform. It contains 150 static clickable mobile interfaces and supports the main website functions.
By analyzing the result of the usability testing session, 80% (4 out of 5) of the participants have completed all required tasks without causing major errors. However, 3 out of 5 of the participant were not able to complete the Task 3 (compare two Electric SUV models) independently, since they cannot directly find the compare feature in the New EVs page. Overall, all participants have obtained a great experience from using the EV Dealer Website. 80% of the participants mentioned that they would recommend the website to their friends and would definitely make a purchase from the website.
The System Usability Scale (SUS) was applied to measure the usability of the website. The average SUS score of the usability test session is 88.5 (Grade A), which identifies as “Excellent” and “Acceptable” scores. The highest score is 95, and the lowest is 85.