Service Outline

Bringing your vehicle in for service can be a complicated process that often leads to a lot of paperwork. At Rivian, I had the opportunity to design a new way to approach this problem, creating a better way to visualize the service history on a vehicle.

 

Project Details

Length: 6 Months

My Role: Senior Product Designer

Platforms: Desktop Web

 

Understanding the Problem

Before I am able to explain Service Outline, I first must explain how Vehicle Service is handled at Rivian. When customers have a service issue arise with their vehicle or wall charger, Rivian creates 3 main ‘containers’ of information to log that issue:

 

Each of these containers are focused on individual pieces of the service journey, and each have their own special use cases:

A service ticket is used as a log of a conversation. One (and only one!) is created whenever a customer calls the Rivian call center or submits an issue on the mobile app.

Work orders are tied to a specific vehicle and indicate which service requests will be addressed during a specific appointment.

A service request is used to track one specific issue. For example: ‘vehicle pulls to the left’ or ‘Spotify app won’t sign in’.

All of these containers are created when customers call Rivian or are created on their behalf when they submit an issue via the mobile app. But here’s the problem. Over time, so many containers were being created that call center employees weren’t able to quickly understand the service history of a vehicle. Users would have to browse through hundreds of pages, reading each page individually and trying to remember their content. Users would even often take handwritten notes as they navigated through each of the pages, writing down key information as they went.

 

“It’s just so much paperwork. Customers call me and ask ‘what’s going on with my car?’ and I have to put them on hold for 10+ minutes while I get up to speed on everything that’s ever been created.”

-Service Support Advisor, Plymouth MI

 
 

Hypothesis: Quick Views

My first idea was to show a quick preview of these containers, allowing users to review what was inside of them without having to launch them entirely. To my surprise, our users hated this idea! They felt the pages were too overwhelming, while still not showing them the information they needed.

From this experience, I learned a few important lessons:

  • Users only need to prioritize a small but mighty amount of fields. These included the Customer Concern, Status, Symptom Tree designation, and submission date.

  • Density > scannability. Users need to feel confident they know the full story, regardless of how much screen space it takes up.

Back to the drawing board…

 

Hypothesis: Visual Diagrams

Ok, now we are making progress! This idea was much more popular with our users. They appreciated being able to see how everything was laid out cleanly and liked seeing the arrows to indicate how each container is connected. However, we learned that we needed to use more visual space for service requests and increase our information density overall. One thing that really made this point stick out to me was when a Service Center Advisor pulled me aside to show me the data on a customer with over 100 service issues. While this was an extreme outlier, it really made it clear how important it would be to strike a balance between information density and legibility.

From this we learned:

  • Better prioritize Service Requests. These are often the main focus of their conversations, as they contain information about their specific issues.

  • Click to open in a new tab. Users want each of these boxes to open the full form in a new tab, as that allows them to load information ahead of time before they get on the phone.

 

Solution: Service Outline

Our final solution! We ultimately decided to use a card-based approach to show the service history. We also utilized an innovative filtering system that would allow users to filter by the different levels of the Symptom Tree. We also introduced an unconventional approach to search, highlighting all associated containers if the keyword is present in any of them.

 

Results and Impact

Service Outline was successfully launched in Q3 of 2022. It is now an integral part of the day-to-day lives of over 100 Service Support Advisors and 30 Diagnostic Specialists. Future enhancements, including creating new tickets, custom views, and a combined view by VIN, are all slated for development in 2023.