Zipcar - Adding insurance during booking

Zipcar - Adding insurance during booking

Zipcar - Adding insurance during booking

Zipcar is the world’s leading car-sharing network, serving over a million members—known as Zipsters—across urban centers, college campuses, and airports worldwide. As a member, when you go on a trip, you don’t want to be held liable if an accident happens. Instead of subscribing to an annual insurance plan, you are given the option to add insurance products to a specific trip.

Designed around the mantra “piece of mind”, this brief will cover problem definition and shaping, research and data analytics, design iterations, and real-world results.

Zipcar is the world’s leading car-sharing network. As a member, when you go on a trip, you don’t want to be held liable if an accident happens. Instead of subscribing to an annual insurance plan, you are given the option to add insurance products to a specific trip.

Designed around the mantra “piece of mind”, this brief will cover problem definition and shaping, research and data analytics, design iterations, and real-world results.

Team

Team

Team

Product Design Lead (Me)
Research
Product
Development

Process

Process

Process

Survey
Comprehension
Stakeholder alignment
Iterations

Survey
Comprehension
Stakeholder alignment
Iterations

Date

Date

Date

2021

Starting from a Success Story

Starting from a Success Story

Starting from a Success Story

In 2021, Zipcar introduced two per-trip insurance products—Damage Protection and Liability Protection—as optional add-ons during trip booking, making full coverage more accessible. The launch saw overwhelming user demand, driving Zipcar’s highest monthly revenue in six years.

The success of these insurance add-ons validated customers' need for per-trip insurance products. As the lead designer for searching and booking, I collaborated with a cross-functional team to take this further—deepening our understanding of customer needs and expectations for single-trip insurance. Our goal was to identify any unmet needs and opportunities for improvement.

Customers Seek Peace of Mind

Customers Seek Peace of Mind

Customers Seek Peace of Mind

We launched a survey to assess how well users understood our insurance offerings and their motivations for purchasing them. 4,260 members who selected the basic insurance plan at sign-up received the survey. 100 responses were collected.

To address user confusion around our insurance products, we aimed to understand:

Comprehension of the insurance products
Perception of the insurance products
Motivations for purchasing

Learnings

Learnings

Learnings

Experience Goal:
Quickly and easily book a trip with full insurance coverage so I can have peace of mind during my trip.

Jobs to Be Done:

Get a quick overview of my trip
See the total cost of my trip
Easily add full insurance coverage without confusion
Feel confident about my trip

Solution

Solution

Solution

We introduced a bundled option—“Full Protection”—as the peace of mind choice. This bundle combines both Liability Protection and Damage Protection into a single, straightforward option.

Comprehension:
We emphasized that this bundle provides full coverage for the trip. Since our members typically book trips as short as a few hours, the price points for these insurance products are relatively low. We hypothesized that members seeking peace of mind would confidently select the Full Protection option without worrying about the other choices or needing to dive into the details of each product. However, we remained open to being proven wrong.

Usability & Ease of Use:
The design pattern clearly indicated that users should select one option out of the three.

Result

Result

Result

After launching the bundle for three months, by the end of 2021, We exceeded all our target metrics:

- Achieved a 20% increase in ancillary revenue
- Increased the conversion rate for Liability Protection by 13% and Damage Protection by 20%
- Received positive reviews on Zipcar’s App Store