Hum:
Customer Convenience

In addition to safety, the other main value proposition for Hum customers is convenience.

When we set out to understand other possible use cases for Hum, we learned more about the cultures that surround the car itself. We heard stories from customers about what their cars mean to them. Some customers talked about how they use the space in their cars to match their lives, from the kinds of things they keep in their cars, to the kinds of cars they buy.

One particular customer talked about the “Jeep wave”, and the car meetup culture that comes with being a Jeep owner. Another customer talked about wanting to keep their cars for as long as they can, but needing a way to manage the maintenance, as well as keeping up-to-date with technological advances in safety features.

These examples had us thinking about how what Hum could truly do to make customers’ lives easier and more convenient, in ways that suit their lifestyles and identities.

Use Cases:
Moving from Personas to Roles / Jobs-to-be-Done

Our core question was: how do people use Hum?

One tool that is commonly used for this work is personas. These are awesome at helping us get the general concept around particular customer use cases. We can name them and give them personalities. We can identify their contexts: what they know, what they believe, what they have, what they buy, what they use, what they like, what they need, or what they want.

Formatting information in this way helps us share information in a narrative arc, which makes for better understanding. This makes sense — humans like stories! When compared to other forms of information communications, like charts, or raw text, stories feel the most organic and natural. We inherently understand stories. We remember stories. And we better relate to stories.

However, we were finding that solely leaning on personas wasn’t really capturing the full spectrum of what Hum could offer a user.

The challenges that personas provide are really well-described in this article by Evergreen Odeh.

Some challenges that Odeh highlights are:

• Personas still have biases built into them, just like we as humans do

• Personas set us up to design products for an aggregate user

• Personas miss out on unique needs

We felt the same at Hum. We could create distinct personas, but we often found that personas lacked nuance and representation. Think of it this way: Hum allows you to track your vehicle. There are a million reasons why you might want to do that, and those reasons don’t all fall under one singular persona. The same functionality applies to several use cases, and trying to categorize them wasn’t getting us far.

This brought us to start structuring use case information according to roles.

Roles are more flexible than personas because they focus on Jobs-to-be-Done, or JTBD, a framework that researchers like Odeh, thought leaders like Tony Ulwick, and others in the UX community heavily promote as an alternative to personas. This allowed us to think about our users and customers’ goals. And framing our information this way actually answered the question we were asking.

Personas can answer: who uses Hum?

But roles in a JTBD framework truly answers: how can people use Hum?

Though I can’t share the personas and roles themselves, here are some examples of the major “jobs” that drove four different kinds of Hum uses. These major themes converged as a result of this research, as well as assessing user analytics patterns.

1. Tracking: Visibility of a car at all times

2. Learning: Information about the car’s status

3. Driving: Information about the car’s use

4. Upgrading: Safety features for older cars in case of emergencies

As you can see, several personas might map to each of these roles. Many of these roles may also map back to each persona. We wanted to make sure that we had multiple ways to consider this information during product development.

Feature Prioritization:
Where Groups Converge and Diverge

Lots of our UX Research work also focused on informing feature prioritization. Here, personas and roles were vital for understanding the context behind why certain features were important to some user groups but not others.

To understand these differences, we employed a mix of methods, including interviews, the Kano method, and general surveys asking how important certain features were (using Likert scale ratings).

An interesting theme in this research was finding where general consumers and B2B customers converged and diverged.

Boundary Alerts was one interesting convergence. We knew from our qualitative insights that B2B companies might use Hum for tracking company vehicles going out into the field. They would often set Boundary Alerts to know when company vehicles were going out of designated areas.

We wondered why general consumers might also highly value Boundary Alerts.

Through in-depth interviews, we learned that general consumers who had teenaged new drivers would set Boundary Alerts to know when the family car might be roving too far, or to an unfamiliar or unapproved area.

Understanding these two different contexts shed light on how we might approach our messaging to these groups!

Gig Driving:
Moving from Cars as Defined Spaces to Cars as Transitional Spaces

Another interesting line of research involved a group that kind of lived between the B2B and consumer spaces. We started to see benefits that Hum might have for customers who took up gig driving, or jobs that consisted of individual contractors driving in order to complete a variety of tasks (e.g., rideshares like Uber or Lyft; food and grocery delivery like DoorDash, InstaCart, or GrubHub).

During this research, we would meet with Uber and Lyft drivers and go on ride-alongs, asking them about their experiences and observing their interactions and tasks throughout the day. We learned that there were elements of their car experiences that were more fixed, while others were more fluid. (Thomas Lodato shared his expertise qualitative research to help us understand these foundational themes, and he did a stellar job walking our teams through these insights!)

Car as Workspace:

First, gig drivers have highly routinized schedules and services. We observed almost all of these drivers rattling off details about their mileage, fluid levels, maintenance appointments, and more. They needed to log this information to be able to be compensated, and they would use this information to optimize where they might drive to find rides, or what jobs to take. For instance, drivers would take their return of time and cost investment before deciding to work a big concert or event.

Next, gig drivers consider maintenance and appearance of their cars to be part of their business costs. Car aesthetics and cleanliness make a huge difference in their job success. This finding is also similar to how home offices can be leveraged for tax purposes.

Because of this, gig drivers highly value trust and convenience in their mechanics. Drivers spoke about a network of professionals that they relied on for keeping their cars in the best shape they could be. Any downtime due to repairs means money down the drain.

Car as Transitional Space:

When considering the multiple transitions that gig drivers have to account for, one thing to note is that many gig drivers consider their work to be a community service. They pride themselves on being able to inform riders on what is going on in town, how best to navigate around, and ensuring that their riders get from place to place safely, even when traveling in other modes of transportation. Some drivers help their passengers with other tasks, like loading and unloading materials, folding baby strollers, or even scheduling multiple drop-off and pick-up points to run errands.

We saw strong examples of this during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Gig drivers served as first responders, going out into the world to help people get food or other supplies. Here’s an excerpt from a talk I shared on how clinical counseling interviewing styles helped uncover these insights, and informed how we interpreted their narratives:

In this transcript, you can see how this gig driver and Hum customer expressed their driving as a service, helping vulnerable populations get what they need. This led to a shift in driver identity as well, in that their perception of the driving that they did became more cautious as they moved into more pedestrian spaces. (You can learn more about the clinical counseling frameworks that I apply to my research by viewing my talk during Accelerant Research’s 2020 October Virtual Insights Conference!)

Given the nature of this work, productivity is largely defined by gig drivers through metrics associated with customer service and satisfaction. They are highly dependent up

Because of this, gig drivers who go the extra mile often personalize their spaces to the riders’ preferences. You can now see this in examples in Uber and Lyft, where you can opt for a quiet ride, share a preference for a certain cabin temperature, or request help with luggage. But during our early research in 2017-2020, drivers were responsible themselves for getting this information from their riders.

Another way that drivers shared that they would personalize riders’ trips was to get a sense of the purpose for the trip and create Spotify playlists that matched their vibe. One driver spoke about having pre-curated playlists for groups of young people going out, older couples going to the airport for a vacation, and professionals on their way to work.

Some drivers have even created their own personas of their riders and streamlined their playlist based on those personas. As a result, drivers get better ratings from their riders. This translates into more profit.

We found these aspects to be particularly enlightening in a few ways.

First, how could we support gig drivers in their reporting? Hum features like mileage reports certainly help with their necessary documentation, but this question prompted lots of discussion from our cross-functional teams.

Also, was there an increased need for connectivity for gig drivers? Hum’s Wi-Fi Hotspot was designed with families in mind, but might gig drivers benefit from this — especially for those curated Spotify lists?

Finally, I found this particularly interesting in that nowhere did gig drivers talk about personalizing the experience to their own tastes. I thought about the range of approaches that people have when we “dress up” our car interiors, or think about the car paint colors that catches our eye. If gig drivers needed to erase themselves from the cabin experience from their personal vehicles, what spaces did they have to express and reflect themselves?

Summary

By being focused on creating an organization-wide, foundational understanding of our customers, our Hum UX Research team helped prompt influential discussion about how to further our products. And the discussions that these multidisciplinary bodies of research invigorated truly showed me how to layer in approaches from other frameworks of research. Getting to do this research for hardware and software, and in both consumer and B2B spaces, is a particularly unique opportunity.

But most interestingly, I really got a chance to learn more about people’s lives outside of our product. I got to connect with people in different communities and locations across the globe. I got to walk (or should I say drive?) several hundred miles in so many people’s shoes. And I learned a lot about life in the process.

I look back fondly on my time working on the Hum team, and I’ve carried the experimental spirit behind that research into all of my projects since!

Special thank-yous to my fellow UX teammates: Alexa Carleo, Shannon Lecates, Thomas Lodato, Marlana Coignet, Sujit Shrestha, Seth Johnston, and our entire Hum team for the collaboration on all of these efforts!

Want to learn more about my industry experience? Go back to my Industry Experience page to see my other Key Strategic Projects, my experience in Team Management, and my milestones in Career Development!

Or, head back to my main Portfolio page to learn more about me!