P2P Carsharing Service Design : Informing User Experience Development

Abstract: This thesis investigates the P2P carsharing user experience. The intention of this investigation is to increase the adoption and uptake of P2P carsharing in existing and future markets because of its benefits to the environment, the local economy and its accruement of social capital. We see P2P carshar- ing as a key means to creating a sustainable urban transportation solution. We started by doing a web review of P2P carsharing followed by a system- atic analysis in which we categorized each platforms’ key attributes. With this information we created two infographics. The first displays existent platforms and their different attributes. The second illustrates the customer journey. We then conducted a survey between April 6 and May 14, 2012, receiving 206 responses from borrowers, owners and people who have not yet used the service. Although the survey was open to anyone, users in the US, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden were targeted. The survey pro- vides demographic information about P2P carsharing users who were found to be young, highly educated, well-off working professionals. Their trans- portation habits and needs, especially as relating to P2P carsharing were also found. After collating this information we partitioned respondents into: Owners, Borrowers, Prospective Owners, Prospective Borrowers, and then orthogonally into US Users and European Users. We then created user pro- files and a mix of short and longer-term multi-stakeholder design chal- lenges for stakeholders; whose work, building off of ours, will we hope, foster innovations that make P2P carsharing a ubiquitous mobility solution.