Road Warrior
An improved user experience and marketing site for the popular route planning mobile app
The Road Warrior team came to us with a product that already ranked as one of the top-rated route planning apps in the app store; it was and is beloved by its loyal user base, and offers a “can’t live without it” feature set. They were looking to take the application's marketing site to the next level. The site needed to clearly describe Road Warrior's offering and benefits, and create a visual language to intrigue its largely male user base.
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The Challenge: Understand the users and optimize for them
The Road Warrior team came to us with a product that already ranked as one of the top-rated route planning apps in the app store; it was and is beloved by its loyal user base, and offers a “can’t live without it” feature set. However, the Road Warrior team was looking to take the existing app’s user experience to the next level, as well as incorporate numerous new features (especially for dispatchers). We kicked off the engagement with a trip to Boulder, Colorado for a full in-person product design sprint.
A Deep Dive Sprint: User and client interviews to establish where we are and where we’re going
To holistically understand Road Warrior and its users, we conducted stakeholder interviews with the principles to establish what was working, what wasn’t, and what simply needed a tune-up. Deep dive sessions with our client proved instrumental in helping our team understand both the existing product and new desired features. Although this was enormously helpful, it’s always hard to be your own navigator. In order to take the guesswork out of discovering what drivers and dispatchers wanted, together with the client we facilitated interviews with real Road Warrior users.
Tamara led the Road Warrior engineering and product team in an affinity diagramming exercise to efficiently and effectively distill the interviews into key themes to guide the design and wireframing process. From these takeaways, we plotted a route to our final product through a UX sprint and marketing site redesign that simultaneously updated and unified the Road Warrior digital ecosystem.
UX to lay down the main roads
After filling our tank with valuable input from both stakeholders and users, we started the UX/Design Sprint by collaboratively articulating high-level use cases and product features Road Warrior wanted to build. We turned these feature requests into “flows,” which we then transformed into full wireframes for all screens (mobile and web). The guiding principles of this sprint were to lower or eliminate hurdles and implement features highly-requested by users.
Saying More with Less
Our content team collaborated with Road Warrior to adjust their messaging to incorporate their newest audience, dispatchers, without abandoning the drivers that make up their core user base. Balancing the language to communicate the feature benefits to both audiences in an integrated way reflected the actual integration of dispatchers and drivers.
Marketing Sign to Put Up the Right Signs
To compliment and promote the upgraded mechanisms of Road Warrior, Simpatico redesigned Road Warrior’s marketing site. Our objectives were to create a visual language that intrigued the largely male user base, and to clearly describe Road Warrior’s offering and benefits.
Inspired by road sign typography and the dynamic imagery of video games — a common theme that surfaced in our interviews — we created a visual style that is bold and direct. The dark color scheme emphasizes Road Warrior’s primary brand color — a vibrant and bright carmine — and draws attention to important calls-to-action. This palette is also ready to be applied to the web and mobile apps where a dark UI can help reduce eye strain and distraction while driving or using the web app for extended periods of time as a dispatcher.
