Keeping the Customer Experience Simple in a Complex, New Service
Bringing Ford's first ride hail subscription service to life within the constraints of an existing enterprise
Service Design · User Research · Onboarding Experience · Process Design · CX Measurement · Subscription Services
2022
FordDrive
Project Summary
Experience Design Strategist & Researcher
I designed the end-to-end customer and operational experience for Ford's first vehicle subscription service — from enrollment through onboarding — and led the research that informed both the launch and the program's expansion into additional markets.
In 2021, EV adoption was accelerating and the landscape was shifting. Uber and Lyft were moving to electrify their fleets, and Ford saw an opportunity to explore a new kind of revenue model alongside it. Ford Drive was a vehicle subscription service for ride-hail drivers — a corporate startup built from scratch inside one of the world's largest automakers. I joined to help launch it.
Listen
Ford knows how to sell vehicles. Ride-hail drivers were a different kind of customer entirely.
Why an EV?
On the surface, they were a natural fit for EV. High mileage, comfort-focused, low tolerance for maintenance, and deeply attuned to operating costs. But that last part was the real insight.
Gig workers run businesses
They calculate everything — cost per mile, utilization, net income per shift. A vehicle lease was not a transportation decision. It was a financial one.
That reframe changed everything. The real question was not whether Ford Drive was a good offer. It was whether a driver could trust that it would not cost them money at the end of the day.
Streamline Operations
That confidence was everything. It moved a customer through the funnel, through onboarding, and all the way to picking up the keys. Lose it at any point — especially at pickup — and the business absorbed the full cost of a failed onboarding. Staged vehicle. Coordinated location. Insurance arranged. Paperwork prepared. All for nothing.
The customer experience was not just important. It was load-bearing for the entire business model.
Simplify
Two things had to work in parallel; Neither was simple.
How do we get eligible customers into the pipeline,
+
get them all the way through to a signed lease and a set of keys?
Service Design
The enrollment process had to screen for eligibility while making the financial case clearly enough that drivers would commit. These were not passive customers. They were evaluating the offer against their own business model in real time.
The onboarding process had to be airtight. Legal requirements, financial paperwork, vehicle staging, location logistics — all of it had to come together at the same moment, for the same customer, without friction.
Prototyping
We started by prototyping in the office. Walking through every step of the process with the team before anyone was standing in a parking lot with a real customer.
Then we took it on location. And that is where we really learned. Where to position the vehicle. How to set up the desk. What digital tools needed to be accessible at the exact moment of sign-up. How to give directions to a location that was not a traditional dealership. Where the process slowed down and why.
Measuring Progress
Every iteration brought us closer to the target: a 10-minute onboarding experience. That number was not arbitrary. It was the threshold at which the process felt effortless to the customer and operationally viable for the business to run at scale.
Legal and financial moments got the most attention. Those were the highest-anxiety points for drivers and the highest-risk points for the business. The script, the training, and the process design all worked together to make those moments feel calm, clear, and fast.
Solve
We launched. And it worked!
72.7
NPS
they felt good about it
163/200
vehicles deployed in 10 weeks
onboarding held up under real conditions
97.8%
payment rate
financial confidence was real
27%
retained 4+ months
loyalty in subscription model with no long-term obligation
Informing the App
Post-launch research revealed something important: drivers needed to accurately track what their vehicle was costing them per shift, per mile, per month. That insight directly informed the Ford Drive vehicle app.
The app launched, and when Ford Drive expanded to additional California markets, it was part of what made that scale possible.
The work did not end at launch. It seeded what came next.
