HiQ Tyres & Autocare

HiQ Tyres & Autocare is Goodyear’s franchised network of over 110 autocentres across the UK. I’ve been privledged to partner with Goodyear since 2006, helping them build their retail offering, providing local communities with fast and friendly tyre and auto care services.

Challenge

Since launching HiQ Tyres & Autocare in 2006, the competitive landscape and customer expectations have been constantly shifting and evolving. However, the core challenges facing HiQ remain true today as they did 18 years ago:

Visitors are often making distress, expensive and technical purchases, of which they have little knowledge or are wary of being misled, misinformed or taken advantage of.

The network of autocentres is owned and run by local entrepreneur that have built their business on trust and engagement with the local community. Centre owners want to retain their local strengths whilst being part of a premium national network.

Solution

Working with the client marketing and technical teams, franchise owners and integration partners I helped established a platform that combines a national and local eCommerce approach by providing a global booking engine, into which each of the auto care franchises have their own eCommerce storefront, allowing local customers to book car services, MOTs and buy tyres at centre specific prices and lead times.

The platform, built on the solid foundations of Craft CMS, integrates with the DVSA and Drive Right Data for vehicle specifications and chassis data. While Klipboard provides integrations and services for tyre data, local availability and purchasing.

Impact

Since launching the platform, product and service offering has continued to evolve. It provides an always on storefront for HiQ centres and an information hub for visitors, helping them to make informed purchase decisions.

A recently re-engineered online service booking system was launched, allowing for a broader array of services to booked with centre specific pricing and availability.

Since launching, service bookings have increased 248% and customer spend is up 70% - excluding any additional work carried out, upon the customers approval, when they arrive at a centre.

Role

User Experience Researcher, User Experience Designer, Senior Interface Developer

Responsibilities

Task driven usability testing, competitor audits, visitor insight analysis, audience interviews, information architecture, UX wireframes, UX prototypes, UX specification, UI design oversight, interface development

Tools

Sketch, Microsoft Clarity, Google Analytics, Google Search Console

Craft CMS, Gulp, JS, LESS, Twig, VSCode, Docker, DDEV

Methodology

Throughout my long-standing partnership with HiQ, I’ve utilised a collaborative delivery methodology called the 5Ds:

  • Discover

    Business, technical and visitor insight gathering

  • Define

    Strategic planning for the platform, definition of a UX and technical approach.

  • Design

    Creative approach, crafting UI designs and development of copy and content.

  • Develop

    Solution production, third party integration, testing and deployment

  • Drive

    Performance monitoring, UX maturity, content management and reporting

These distinct phases provide an iterative framework that ensures strategic thinking and experience design combine effectively to launch and manage multiple projects in tandem.

Discover

The Discover phase enabled me to uncover the core requirements of the project for both the Goodyear client and retail franchise owners through stakeholder workshops. During these workshops, ideation sessions were combined with MoSCoW rankings to identify and prioritise the requirements of both groups, which were often in conflict.

To ensure a customer centric solution, group discussions, one-to-one interviews and task driven usability studies for both existing and potential HiQ customers further refined the requirements, firmly placing the customer at the centre of the solution.

An extensive competitor audit helped to establish existing industry standards and conventions, while highlighting strategic areas where HiQ could truly differentiate and ‘punch above its weight’.

Car sorting

Tyre pressure monitoring system

Run on flat tyres

Winter tyres

Lazer wheel alignment

Card ranking

MoSCoW

  • Cross sell products
  • MOT Reminders
  • Maintenance Schedule
  • Mobile Optomised
  • Booking Calendar
  • Decouple Auxiliary services
  • Design Refresh

Test Driven Usability

Buy now

Define

The insights gathered during the Discover phase informed the strategic direction for the project. A refined Information Architecture (IA) was developed, outlining the global and centre-specific changes, such as the consolidation of service and support information, new booking journey and refined product categorisation.

User Experience Wireframes were crafted to illustrate to the client, design and development teams how the information architecture and content strategy would combine with the project’s functional requirements. Interactive prototypes were then developed to allow for iterative testing and to aid in client communication and understanding.

Once approved, two key specification were written: a UX Specification that outlined the requirements and constraints for the user experience of the project functionality, and a Technical Specification that detailed how the project would be implemented within Craft CMS and integrated with third-party platforms.

Wireframes

Desgin

Working collaboratively with the design team, we seized the opportunity to refine the existing creative platform into a comprehensive Design System for HiQ.

Key components, widgets, templates, interactions, colours, typography and asset treatments were created and organised into a cohesive and flexible system.

This approach provided the necessary building blocks for both Design and Development teams to build out content, templates and functionality consistently across multiple project phases.

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  • Avenir Medium
  • 48px
  • 500
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  • Avenir Medium
  • 40px
  • 400
h3

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  • Avenir Medium
  • 32px
  • 300
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  • 0,159,227
    #009FF8
  • 32,173,255
    #20ADFF
  • 69,187,255
    #45BBFF
  • 106,201,255
    #6AC9FF
  • 144,214,255
    #90D6FF
  • 181,228,255
    #B5E4FF

Develop

To support the delivery of the project across multiple phases, a strategic roadmap was created. This allowed for the prioritisation of features and content, ensuring the most impactful features were delivered first.

The first phase saw the development of the new multi-step, global booking engine. This engine supports two different visitor journeys:

  • Global journey: Visitors are required to enter their vehicle registration and location information, then choose their HiQ centre within the booking engine
  • Centre specific journey: Starting directly on a HiQ centre page, visitors only need to provide their vehicle registration, and the centre selection step is completely bypassed.

By providing the vehicle registration, a custom Craft CMS plugin performs an API lookup to a third-party service. This services determines the vehicles specification, such as its engine size and fuel type.

This data allows the booking engine to only show products that are applicable to a vehicle, such as “diesel particulate filters” to diesel fuel types and allows for correct pricing for car servicing.

Visitor journey

  • Home
  • Vehicle
  • HiQ Centre
  • Services
  • Appointment
  • Personal
  • Thank you
  • HiQ Centres
  • Centre
  • Vehicle

Drive

Following the launch of the re-engineered online service booking system, I've implemented iterative improvements with the aim of boosting service conversions and increasing footfall to HiQ centres.

Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity help me to monitor how visitors interact with the platform, while surveys and feedback from visitors and centre managers provide insights into their evolving requirements.

With each new release, I monitor its impact on the booking engine and conversions. While the 'auto care' segment might appear consistent, it has seasonal ups and downs. Furthermore, the lingering effects of COVID lockdowns continue to impact the regularity of MOTs and car servicing. These external factors need to be carefully considered when judging the effectiveness of improvements.

Service booking engagement

  • 2021
  • 2022
  • 2023
  • 2024
  • 2025

Regular quarterly reviews allow client and cross-agency teams to reflect on the platform's performance, search engine optimisations efforts and digital and social advertising campaigns. These reviews also provide the opportunity to plan and adjust the annual roadmap based on evolving business needs.

Launch HiQ Tyres & Autocare