Yinxuan Zhou

Hi, this is Tom.

Masters student in both Service design and industrial design, specializing in research, product management , user experience, user interface, 3D CAD modeling, rendering, motion graphic. Having strong consciousness of leading project and team collaboration. Know how to access to programmer and team manager, have seven years experience.

Car rental is one of the industries that recovered quickly after the pandemic and created new opportunities to nurture new users. The market size in China is expected to reach £8.6 billion in 2021. China has issued guiding opinions on promoting the car rental market mainly based on the principles of safety, innovation, and supervision, and formulated a series of measures to promote the industry, like improving online and offline service capabilities. People spend more money on transport, which helps upgrade travel consumption and benefit the development of the car rental industry. China has far more drivers than cars. Besides, changing attitudes from vehicle ownership to mobility-as-a-service between the new generation also boost the car rental market. New technologies, like 5G, blockchain, and AI, bring opportunities for platform upgrading and accelerate the coordinated development of upstream and downstream industries.

Target user definition — we define new drivers as a group of this kind people who have a driver’s license but do not own a car and who are not skilled drivers.

PEST analysis — Firstly we used PEST to analyze the whole industry, which was essential for us to make decision in the next steps. From the policy side, China has issued guiding opinions on promoting the car rental market, which are mainly based on the principles of safety, innovation and supervision, and formulated a series of measures to promote the industry, like improving online and offline service capabilities.

Post-covid-19 opportunity — We identify two opportunities in post-covid-19 era. People prefer to drive their own cars to go out. People are more concerned about the hygiene, disinfection, safety, and privacy of the vehicles. Therefore, Car rental is one of the industries that recovered quickly after the pandemic and created new opportunities to nurture new users. The market size is expected to reach eight point six 8.6 billion pounds in 2021.

Car rental scenarios — Car rental scenarios can be classified into different circles based on time and distance. like commuting, touring, wedding, etc. We chose to focus on new drivers group, people who have a driving license but not yet own a car and who aren’t skilled in driving. The group of who use a renting car for practicing driving accounts for around eighteen point seven percent18.7% in the car rental market currently 46% of drivers in China don’t own cars.

Persona — This is our customer profile. Tom, a 28 years old college student based in Hangzhou, holding driving license for 3 years. He is afraid of driving and unfamiliar with traffic rules. He wishes to acquire skilled driving, go on road trips with friends, overcome driving fear and it would be better if someone could accompany with him when driving.

Journey map — When we were doing interviews and experiencing the car rental services, we found that paint points are mostly happened in before and during stages.

HMW — So this is our HMW, How might we provide assistance for new drivers in order to overcome their driving fears?

Platform overview — Our service covers the whole journey, before, during, and after. In before stage, we design a novice tutorial to guide new drivers to get familiar with their renting car. In during stage, we provide emergency service to drivers if unexpected things happened. In after stage, we use a comment board to connect people and receive customer feedbacks.

Novice tutorial — When driver get in the car, they should put their phone on NOPI. Then, drivers could open the app to pair the phone with NOPI. After choosing the beginner tutorial, drivers should follow the instructions of this car’s components and then complete all exercise to get familiar with this car. After that, NOPI will prompt users to start their trip

Novice tutorial — Here is the detailed user interface of tutorial process. Some complex or ambiguous function buttons will light up one by one, and then the driver can follow the voice prompts and gestures to guide the learning step by step. After completing each step, NOPI could recognize the driver's actions and then give them correct or wrong prompt feedback to help them better understand different components of the car

Emergency service — When everything gets ready, you can tell NOPI where you want to go, then NOPI starts to navigate. If unexpected things happen to you when you are driving and you have no idea about it, you could fix it by following AI tips step by step or call the ehi customer service hotline directly

Comment board — When you arrive, you click the button to end the trip, NOPI will play the voice left by the last passenger automatically. It also asks if you want to leave some words for next passenger or us. After giving your message, your voice will be transferred to text by NOPI, and your voice will be stored and wait for the next passenger.

Introduction of NOPI — This is our service video

Feasibility & Viability — We prototype with eHi and eHi’s users. eHi is very happy with our design proposals and they are willing to develop demo with us. We also test our ideations with ehi users. our business model is “Prior embedded hardware + Pay to unlock software service”, which is an emerging business model in China’s Car manufacturing industry because of the Low cost and high profit. Then we calculate cost and profit of our service.

Our project partners are frog design and ehi car services. The aim of this project is to explore and envision future trends of smart mobility, to design service and product that can be embedded in the future scenarios.

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Yinxuan Zhou

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Royal College of Art