It was 2 a.m., and the night wrapped around them like a suffocating blanket. John’s eyes flicked nervously between the glowing phone screen and the empty, dimly lit street. His two-year-old daughter, finally asleep after a long day, stirred in her car seat. Google Maps had insisted they had arrived, but there was no Zoomcar parking in sight. Just an eerie silence.
His wife looked at him, her face illuminated by the dashboard lights, worry etched in every line. "What do we do now?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
John clenched the steering wheel, trying to keep calm. "I’ll figure it out," he muttered, though even he wasn’t sure what to do next.
Minutes stretched into an agonizing hour as they circled around, searching for any sign of the Zoomcar lot.
Nothing. No response from customer service. His phone battery hovered dangerously low, much like his hope.
“We’re going to miss our flight,” his wife said, breaking the heavy silence. The words hung in the air, choking him. They still had a two-hour drive to the airport—if they could even find the car. His mind raced. How much would they be charged if they missed the return? How would they explain this to the airline, or worse, their exhausted child?
His daughter stirred again, starting to cry. The dream of a perfect family trip now felt like a cruel joke. This was supposed to be the moment they’d remember forever—adventuring through South India, creating memories. But now, all he felt was dread.
Regret washed over him in waves. Why had he booked this car? Why hadn’t he seen this coming? The flight they were so close to missing wasn’t just a departure—it was their escape from this nightmare. And time, merciless and unrelenting, was running out.
The decision to rethink TripBuddy didn’t start with a new feature request or a product roadmap update—it started with a frustrated user—a regular Zoomcar user who missed their flight because of this mis-info (read no info). Something so small, yet it had a ripple effect. We realized then that design isn’t just about making things work; it’s about creating moments where people felt understood. That user wasn’t just interacting with an app; they were trying to navigate their life, and that’s where we stepped in.
TripBuddy — Redefining the Zoomcar Journey
TripBuddy is that phase of the app experience which begins once the user has booked a car.
Zoomcar is an Indian self-drive car rental service that allows users to book vehicles for short or long-term use. Founded in 2013, Zoomcar revolutionized car rental industry in India by providing a convenient, hassle-free alternative to chauffeur-driven rentals. It catered to various users needs such as family road trips, business travel, or just a day out in the city.
TripBuddy is the phase of the app experience that begins once the user has booked a car, whether through desktop or mobile, and continues through their entire journey—starting from the moment they are ready to hit the road until they return the car and settle the payment.
The Problem
Over 33% of Zoomcar bookings required users to call support for various information, leading to substantial customer service costs.
As users navigate Zoomcar’s customer journey, they need access to a range of contextual information at various stages of their trip. However, our initial analysis revealed that the delivery of this information was disjointed and inconsistent, resulting in a broken user experience. Due to this fragmentation, over 33% of bookings led to users calling customer support for information regarding their bookings.
The directive was clear—find a way to reduce the expense associated with inbound support calls.
The Challenge
Zoomcar’s Trip Buddy wasn’t about adding another layer to the app—it was about reimagining how users engaged with their entire travel experience. The problem wasn’t simply functionality; it was emotional. Users were often confused, overwhelmed, or felt lost during key moments in their journey. And those moments—however brief—made the entire experience feel fragmented.
We were tasked with bridging that gap. Our goal wasn’t just to address pain points; it was to make the experience felt like it knew the user, guiding them at every turn, seamlessly.
Our high level goals were
Make Trip Buddy a companion rather than just another tool.
Create a platform for innovation and deeper engagement.
Reduce ambiguity around contextual data users need.
Reduce number of distressed user calls to support
Assembling the pieces
The first step I took was to look at the current user journey for our users, what happens at each of these stages and what pain points we currently know.
Early insights from research
We started with understanding how users think and feel during critical moments in their journey—before, during, and after they got behind the wheel. We also studied their driving behavior, pickup & drop offs and payments, mapping out where frustration set in and where satisfaction peaked. The insights were striking.
Users didn’t need more features—they needed clarity.
Discovery
Users didn’t need more features—they needed clarity. They didn’t want an overload of information, but rather subtle nudges at the right time. So, instead of complicating the interface, we focused on making it as intuitive as possible, with Trip Buddy guiding users like a friend, anticipating needs before they arose.
Users wanted a seamless way to stay informed, make changes, and handle unforeseen circumstances without stress. But in reality, they were left feeling overwhelmed—having to juggle last-minute changes, navigational issues, and coordination problems without the right tools to guide them.
The Approach
In uncovering the problem, my first step was to get clear on the actual issues users faced. I began by gathering product requirements from primary research—starting with a deep dive into call monitoring—and from there, I planned and led nine UX activities to thoroughly investigate.
Field studies were up first. We covered 20 pickup points across five cities, including both Tier 1 and Tier 2 areas. This wasn’t just about mapping locations; we observed the ease and challenges users faced reaching these points, both day and night. We watched users in real time as they picked up and dropped off their cars, documenting everything from the time they spent navigating these spaces to how they interacted with the service.
We also held interviews right at these sites. The on-ground fleet teams, who handled pickups and drop-offs, became an invaluable source of insights—they offered a unique perspective on frequent issues, last-minute changes, and unexpected user behavior that often went unreported.
To dig deeper, I conducted additional user interviews—sometimes over calls, other times inviting them into our office. Each conversation uncovered new angles and complexities of their journey. In tandem, I monitored over 50 support calls, stepping in to answer 15 of them with an executive by my side. Listening to users’ immediate concerns brought a raw, firsthand understanding of their frustrations and questions.
Once the insights were gathered, I transformed them into a customer journey map, tracing users’ emotional highs and lows at each stage of their trip. Finally, before diving into solution discovery, I did a competitive analysis and reviewed analytics data, ensuring that every angle was covered before defining our next steps forward.
My Role
My role for this large project was divided into three phases:
1. Problem Discovery (Where we uncovered multiple user pain points),
2. Solution Discovery (Where I created the end-to-end user experience),
3. Validation Phase (Where I tested, iterated & tracked metrics to validate solutions)
Existing Zoomcar sites
Most dedicated Zoomcar sites needed additional coordination effort, imagine a pick-up without it
We were working parallely to create a different model, more sustainable. The zoomcar picking experience was bound to be affected. So whatever solution we come up with needed to be scalable.
Currently Zoomcar owned roughly about 3000 fleet and approx 10-15 dedicated pick-up sites/city. But with ZAP model, there would be no dedicated pickup points anymore. That would add to the ongoing pickup problems for users by 10x
Most dedicated Zoomcar sites needed additional coordination effort from fleet. The new ZAP model would remove the need to have a dedicated space and the cars will be pickedup from various addresses throughout the city.
Reframing the problem
Lack of information was causing disruption in users overall trip experience.
The Zoomcar experience was riddled with issues: inaccurate location details, missing critical information, and inefficient fuel and payment settlement processes. Instead of enjoying their well-deserved vacation, users found themselves stressed over Zoomcar’s processes, often needing to repeatedly call support to resolve payment issues. This constant back-and-forth left users frustrated and mentally drained, overshadowing what should have been cherished memories of their recent trip
Our philosophy—Never Stop Living
It wasn’t just about building another feature for zoomcar; it was about changing how people felt about their journeys. Most apps had the basics down—booking, riding, paying—but we wanted to craft something memorable. Something that would make users walk away from their trip feeling like they experienced more than just a ride. What could we do differently? How could we tap into their emotions?
This begged the question how might we reduce users anxiety and help them feel supported throughout the process?
The booking experience redesign
Introducing Trip Buddy
In the crowded world of ride-sharing apps, there’s no shortage of features that promise convenience and efficiency. But at the core of it, people just want to get from Point A to Point B, right? Wrong.
TripBuddy empowered users to fully enjoy their trips, free from worry. It delivered timely, relevant information right when they needed it, creating a seamless experience that felt attuned to their needs. By enhancing user engagement, TripBuddy also strengthened customer loyalty with Zoomcar.
How we got there
Elevate the experience for all users
Three primary questions informed my design strategy:
How do you solve for all use cases, across different pickup models?
What contexts need to be considered?
What is a perfect booking experience ?
Early on, it was important to understand different factors that may influence the pick-up and drop-off experience. I mapped all the possible concepts and translated this into a framework.
The turning point: A key insight
We remember experiences as a series of snapshots rather than a complete catalogue of events. The most emotionally intense points of an experience and the end of that experience are heavily weighted in how we remember an event.
We observed during a) pickup b) drop-off and c) settle stages, there were a lot of pain points that were leading to AAAD (Anxiety, Ambiguity, Anger, and Dissatisfaction) amongst users. By analyzing the extent of emotions (represented by light-colored rings below) helped me in leveraging a cognitive bias called the peak-end rule.
The peak-end rule is a cognitive bias that impacts how people remember past events. Intense positive or negative moments (the "peaks") and the final moments of an experience (the "end") are heavily weighted in our mental calculus.
With this in mind, I recognized that the peak experience might fall outside our control, as the journey’s most intense moments could arise at any point, not just during car pickup. However, I was confident the end experience lay in the drop-off and settle stages, which became the focal point of my solutions.
Component-based design: Plug & Play
Before starting the solution phase, it was clear to me that I needed to build the app experience in such a way that:
a) it is easily scalable,
b) the contextual info can be added or replaced as and when required, and
c) each of these data points can be plugged in by the back-end when it's called.
Working Backwards from Payment Settlement
I reversed the polarity of the imperfect pickup to jumpstart creativity. Four key design challenges emerged:
Starting from ground up, there were four key design challenges that emerged:
How might we better show where the pickup point is?
How might we solve for in-trip challenges that will help users avoid penalties?
How might we make a unexpected charges more transparent?
How might we better adapt to the dynamic nature of zoomcar pickup points?
In order to optimize the booking experience, there was only one place we needed to start from—the end.
Our research revealed that payment settlement invoked the strongest emotional response; however, this response was predominantly negative rather than positive.
Three things we identified that were not acceptable even for us let alone for creating an unforgettable journey.
Users were charged for each time they exceeded the speed limit.
Users were charged for excess kilometers and for late return neither of which had any supporting information in the app.
The only way to settle dispute was to call the customer center. The settlement was also not immediate as customer support had to validate the claim before the payout leaving users worried and anxious for days.
Changes that we made to enhance the experience were not restricted to designing new user interface only, we also pushed back on the product to make certain critical changes that had an impact on user's psyche. Being a price sensitive market, indians are extremely emotional when it comes to money. Users claim they were being unfairly charged for things they didn't agree with as there was no transparency in the system.
We knew from missing cashback data that 26% of returning users came to check their cashback. Leveraging this hook that to keep the user engaged by providing product discovery assets such as cross sell, upsell etc, and leveraging content strategy. Each of these assets corresponded to the three stages dynamic framework nudge, educate and feedback based on product intelligence
We were concerned about increase in visit:exit click ratio since we were essentially introducing friction but to achieve target activation numbers we were willing to take that risk.
In order to validate our hypothesis, we conducted guerilla and usability testing in several places and offices. To our surprise not a single participant had difficulty understanding the sequence. confirming our intuition for something something
The Zoomcar site experience
We knew we had just 40 seconds of a user’s attention, and we had to make every bit of it count.
With the idea we zeroed in during the design sprint, we made our first wireframe draft addressing pain points at each stage. Some of the major points we addressed were:
Push notifications during booking confirmation, soft allocation, and hard allocation of car.
Transparency in the license verification process.
Outstanding payment before pick up.
How pick up and drop off works.
Last-mile directions.
Instead of crowding everything up front, we decided to tuck the offers under a secondary layer, creating a dedicated space for all the hidden deals. This decision wasn’t just a design tweak—it involved a backend overhaul and, most importantly, a shift in how users would interact with the offers.
The real challenge here was changing user behavior. People were used to seeing offers right away, so asking them to take an extra step required careful thought.
We knew we had just 40 seconds of a user’s attention, and we had to make every bit of it count. Since the first fold was our prime real estate, we used a chunking method to break things down into manageable pieces. After exploring a bunch of options, we landed on a design that was both clean and efficient, addressing all these issues while making the best use of the available space.
From booking to pickup
We realized pain points could be bucketed into 'Lead to cancelation' and 'Lead to delayed pick up'.
Once the booking is made, if the user is a first-timer, he must upload his driving license and wait for verification, which was mandatory for picking up the car. We realized that the pain points during booking could be bucketed into those that lead to cancelation and those that lead to delay in picking up.
Let's look at the top 8 pain points that led to the cancellation of a booking or delay in picking up the car.
No visibility on the ID verification process.
No easy way to review status updates or any action that needs to be taken.
No update on the pending security deposit.
Absence of critical information to bring a physical copy of their driving license.
No information about the pickup process.
No easy way to find the car.
No last mile direction.
No option to navigate to the pickup point.
Giving users more value for their time Knowing the users intent and the understanding of their purchase journey allowed us to do the heavy lifting and present the more optimal information upfront. The system needed to be smart enough to just work when it could, and humble enough to intervene when it couldn't.
To make the store more efficient, we knew we had to go beyond just listing offers. The goal was to give users all the relevant information they needed to make informed choices. Everything we did was focused on their needs and benefits.
By analyzing path data and shopping behavior, we identified key product assets that could boost the experience, such as creating benefit-oriented stories curated by CashKaro.
One of our main goals was to cut down on the number of cashback-related queries. We knew from customer calls that users often had questions about how cashback worked, and the key was to reinforce that information until it became second nature for them.
We started by putting cashback tracking data front and center, making it super easy to understand. But during testing, we realized users wanted even more details, so we made the data tapable for quick access. We also added quick T&Cs and FAQs with the most common queries directly on the store page, helping to reduce missing cashback tickets and boost our satisfaction scores.
Another riskier design decision I made was to inculcate the terms and conditions during the core flow
The idea was to make that information very contextual and relevant as and when the user needed it to persuade users to focus on the key terms so they dont miss out on the promised cashback.
This meant the UX needed to bring in friction during the checkout flow which is always a risky move. at the same time instill confidence for the majority and those who wanted to assert control needed to know the terms and conditions
From Ambiguous to Obvious
They had fulfilled their end of the deal, yet CashKaro wasn’t delivering.
A key part of the store experience is ensuring that users have a clear view of their earnings and past purchases. The existing CashKaro app wasn’t doing enough to support this, relying heavily on an overly complicated and mostly confusing earnings tab.
During our research, we uncovered several challenges related to cashback and earnings. Users struggled with recent clicks, raising tickets, and distinguishing between rewards and earnings—it was a common source of confusion.
It became clear that users were facing a lot more frustration than they should have, struggling just to find the cashback they were promised. They had fulfilled their end of the deal, yet CashKaro wasn’t delivering, leaving them to deal with the confusion and hassle. It wasn’t just a minor inconvenience—it was a significant failure on our part, creating unnecessary friction and eroding their trust.
We introduced the earnings feature directly on the store page—a framework designed to reflect a user’s relationship with a particular brand. It works by analyzing past purchases to present more relevant offers and products, displaying both recent and overall earnings by pulling data from the backend.
The larger vision was to create a system that encouraged users to withdraw their cashback or convert their rewards into gift coupons, ensuring that the CashKaro journey ended with that final "aha" moment. The true measure of success for the project was when users could finally experience the satisfaction of real cashback hitting their bank accounts—without that, the journey felt incomplete.
The Launch & Impact
It is great to know that the new CK Store is scheduled to launch in December 2024.
In the 6 months where I was exclusively working on store, I also started redefining other user journeys and pulled my team to evolve and polish the visual design for the desktop. It is great to know that the new CK Store is scheduled to launch in December 2024.
Some of the key parts from the new designs (cashback tracking info, similar stores and cashback rates) are already a part of the current app.
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