Optimizing the Mobile Dashboard to Empower Repair Shops
October 2024
Overview
Fixico is a digital platform that streamlines the car repair process by connecting businesses and drivers with a network of repair shops. It offers an end-to-end, effortless repair experience, smart matchmaking to find the best repair solutions, and real-time insights to support data-driven decision-making.
Problem
The “My Appointments page” was not optimized for mobile, creating inefficiencies for repair shop users and limiting Fixico’s ability to improve engagement.
Solution
A clean, intuitive design that empowered users to act quickly and efficiently, promoting engagement and higher on-time scores.
Role
Lead product designer
Tools
Figma, Miro
Key UX highlights
Used real-world observations and data to identify pain points and design mobile-friendly solutions for vehicle intake and return.
Solutions directly supported Fixico’s goals of improving engagement and repair cycle transparency.
Developed a hypothesis and experiment to measure the impact of mobile optimizations on task efficiency and on-time scores.
Problem space
Fixico's repair shop dashboard was responsive but not designed with mobile users in mind. This wasn’t ideal for repair shop owners and employees, who rarely sat at a desk all day. During a user visit, I observed the repair shop owner moving between reception, the back office, the garage, and the paint booth—all while juggling tasks beyond their computer and the Fixico dashboard.
It was clear that mobile usability was critical for these users, but they were limited to their desktop for an optimal experience of the dashboard. This was a missed opportunity to improve engagement by meeting users where they already were: their phones.
Defining the focus
I started with data, because I wanted to know how and for which tasks repair shops were using the Fixico dashboard on their phones. Partnering with our data analyst, I discovered that the "My Appointments" page was the most visited on mobile—accounting for 18% of 12,637 mobile visits over six months. The page’s primary task was confirming vehicle intake and return. This data meant users were viewing the list of vehicles that needed to be brought into the garage and returned to the customers.
I chose this task to evaluate for the following two reasons:
The data supported this decision—users were actively visiting the “My Appointments” page on their phones.
A newly introduced feature, on-time scores, aimed to encourage users to confirm the intake and return of vehicles promptly. Optimizing the mobile experience for this task would help users improve their on-time scores more efficiently.
Assessing the usability of the task flow
I led a usability heuristic evaluation with my team to assess the vehicle intake and return task, using Nielsen Norman Group’s Heuristic Evaluation workbook. We individually performed the task on our phones, starting from the "My Appointments" page and ending with the confirmation toast, noting any designs that failed to meet usability heuristics.
After gathering individual findings, I synthesized the data, grouped similar issues by page and component, and facilitated a discussion to prioritize them by severity. Finally, I created and presented design solutions to address these issues and optimize the task for mobile.
Findings
There were a total of 29 issues across five pages/components. The "My appointments" page had the most concerns. See below for a breakdown.
What's wrong with the "My Appointments" page?
Key details like due dates are missing, irrelevant information like repair price clutters the page, and worst of all, the task itself cannot be completed directly from the page. More specifically, the page failed to meet several key heuristics:
Aesthetic and Minimalist Design: Displaying irrelevant details, like the repair price and duration, did not support the user’s goal and added unnecessary clutter.
Visibility of system status: There was no indication of the expected date for intake and return.
Flexibility and efficiency of use: Completing the task required multiple steps and navigating between pages. To confirm a return, the user had to:
Tap the card to open the detail page
Tap Confirm return, triggering a dialog
Tap the date field, which opened a calendar
Select the return date
Tap Confirm
For each additional report, the user had to navigate back to the "My Appointments" page and repeat the entire process. This made a simple task unnecessarily tedious, especially when dealing with multiple vehicles.
What should be a straightforward task—confirming an intake or return—ends up requiring significant cognitive effort.
Design optimizations
I approached the redesign with one question: How can we make this task effortless? Here’s what I did:
Added urgency - Highlighted due dates with orange chips to guide users’ attention.
Simplified the interface - Removed the support text, repair price, and duration, reducing visual noise.
Streamlined the workflow - Introduced action buttons directly on the page, allowing users to confirm intake/return without leaving the page.
The result? A clean, intuitive design that empowered users to act quickly and efficiently. Now, the "My Appointments" page allowed users to easily confirm the intake and return of multiple vehicles. Clear due dates helped repair shop users stay on track, keep customers informed, and effortlessly maintain or improve their on-time scores.
Measuring impact
The mobile optimizations were designed to enhance the user experience, enabling users to confirm vehicle intake and return more efficiently on their phones. But what about the business impact?
These changes had the potential to improve on-time scores by making the task faster and easier, increasing engagement with the repair tracker—one of the repair shop team's key objectives. Higher on-time scores would help users keep customers informed and improve repair cycle time accuracy. To test whether the mobile optimizations had an impact on on-time scores, I set up an experiment with the following hypothesis:
Optimizing the confirm intake/return flow on mobile will increase task completion on mobile, leading to improved on-time scores.
Experiment setup:
Control group: Repair shops with the original "My Appointments" page design.
Experimental group: Repair shops with the mobile-optimized "My Appointments" page design.
On-time scores were measured every three months for both groups to assess differences.
Success would be indicated by a significant increase in mobile usage for this task and higher on-time scores in the experimental group compared to the control group.
Conclusion
This project wasn’t just about improving a page—it was about meeting users where they are and removing friction from their day. By enabling repair shop teams to confirm vehicle intake and return more easily, we supported their ability to keep repairs on track, improve transparency with customers, and ultimately promote high on-time scores. This experience reminded me of the value of designing with purpose: understanding the user’s environment, aligning with business goals, and delivering solutions that create impact.
Personal learning
The biggest challenge for me was thinking about how to test the mobile optimizations. How could I prove that the mobile optimizations had an impact (or not) on users’ experience? I considered tracking the frequency of task completion on mobile before and after the mobile optimizations. But this would have left room for confounding factors, like peak season for repairs, which could skew the results. I decided on running an experiment with a controlled and experimental group since this method is better in isolating a cause-and-effect relationship. This experience reinforced the importance of choosing the right validation approach and deepened my understanding of measuring UX impact despite real-world constraints.
