If you’re among the lucky ones who’s booked car repair or maintenance in the last week on Openbay, you might have noticed something different about our look. What’s our secret sauce? A brand-spanking new vehicle-owner dashboard!
Of course Openbay has always been mobile-optimized – especially given 87% of millennials admit “my smartphone never leaves my side, night or day.” – and now, our newly revamped vehicle-owner dashboard enables members to compare, book and pay for auto repair with an even smoother transition between laptop, mobile or tablet.
Our dev team has toiled to put this new dashboard out ‘on the road,’ and here are some of their thoughts on the redesign:
Here’s what Adam Bair, Openbay’s CTO, had to say about the new VO dash:
One of the major themes behind this redesign was to streamline and simplify the vehicle owner’s experience. We’ve removed a lot of visual cruft and wordy passages in favor of a simplified and intuitive user interface with a significant focus on responsive design. Our new interface is now friendly and accessible from just about any connected device or screen size. The new design was also built in a modular fashion which will allow us to build new and interesting features with less effort required on the front-end.
As a startup, we move quickly and experiment with many features and implementations, fueled by feedback from our users, metrics, and innovation from our team. Every so often we step back take a look at what we’ve built and distill the interface down to reveal or emphasize our best and most successful features and experiments. Features that are no longer necessary and experiments that didn’t work out are removed, remixed, or moved to the background to make way for the new freshness. This allows our users to easily access the best that the Openbay platform has to offer.
Mike Desjardins, Openbay’s VP of engineering, weighs in:
Even though we have an iOS app (with Android to follow!), a good deal of our web traffic is mobile- and tablet-based, so we approached the dashboard redesign from a more mobile-centric view. The previous UI had some pages which looked OK on mobile, but for this new design we truly focused on responsive design to make it an enjoyable experience on the web, as viewed from a mobile device.
We also spent considerable effort simplifying and going with a “less is more” philosophy. Fewer links, calls to action, etc., to make it easier and more intuitive to use.
We hope our users enjoy the clean redesign of the new vehicle-owner dashboard.
If you have’t yet tried Openbay, give it a shot. It’s free for vehicle owners to register and use. Simply let us know what your vehicle needs, receive quotes from shops in your neighborhood, select the one that’s best for you, then schedule service, and pay via Openbay once your car repair work is complete. Openbay is car repair for today’s world.
