Bringing a Historic American Company Into the 21st Century

Go to Experience

The Winnebago App is an app designed to give Winnebago owners a digital toolkit for managing their vehicle. You can download owner’s manuals and other material relating to your specific vehicle, find local service locations even while you’re away from home, and access How-To videos for servicing your home away from home.

Our agency was trusted with this project after demonstrating our capabilities with the redesigning of the Winnebago website and the enhancing their online shopping tools (both of which I was the Lead Product Designer on). I drafted the initial development roadmap that would take us from research to design to engineering. During the design phase I would work with my small team of 3 designers to deliver the perfect 0 -> 1 product. It was imperative to deliver something of value today, while planning for future enhancements.

Client: Winnebago Industries
Roles: Lead Product Designer

Some upfront work was needed to understand the opportunity space. I interviewed most of the Winnebago leadership to understand what a home-run MVP would like like. I also looked at the research reports from past Winnebago user studies to gather customer painpoints. From these, I then compiled notes and affinitized them into themes.

I then looked at other RV competitors to understand what aspects worked well for them. Again I compiled these findings and affinitized them into themes.

After going through dozens of RV companies, we settled on the “big 3” competitors: Airstream, Forest River, and Thor RVs.

SWOT Analysis

I also looked into industry research that explained the value of RV app experiences, good practices, and design pitfalls. With this, and the findings from previous exercises, I completed a SWOT analysis of apps with my team. We came up with this list:

Weaknesses:

  • Limited available capabilities

  • Flat information architecture

  • Customer perception

  • Visual design

Strengths:

  • Self-service capabilities

  • Access to customer support

  • Ease of use

  • Curated content

  • Specialized experience based on model

  • 24/7 accessibility

Defining the area of opportunity

With 3 weeks spent gaining the foundational understanding of the product and RV companion app space, I now was able to define exactly what areas we would be exploring in our MVP. The focuses would be on Interactions, Visuals, and Branding.

Design Principles

In order to focus our thinking and make decisions on what ideas to pursue in the future, I developed design principles:

  1. Tailor the experience to the customer.
    Understand the emotional state and journey of the customer before entering The Winnebago App, and personalize the experience accordingly to the customer’s specific model.

  2. Educate in stages.
    Set realistic expectations early, and avoid unintended deception. Describe user benefits, not technology. Describe the core value initially, but introduce new features as they are used.

  3. Make the experience memorable through delightful issue resolution.
    We encourage the customer to return to The Winnebago App by providing delightful and memorable experiences. The customer is never stuck in a dead-end. If we aren’t able to solve the issue, we will direct the customer to a human who can.

Ideation

Now's the fun part. With the broad areas defined, and specific opportunities in each area, I could go create and document my design ideas.

The user flow for signing up and adding an RV

My team and I iterated on lo-fi wires for 2 weekly sprints. We would get present updates every 2 days to our development team and work collaboratively to both stay in scope and design something of value. It was during this time that we validated user flows, information architecture, and the overall sitemap of the app.

MVP Design Concepts

How To Guides - Detailed video guides for your RV.

Digital Owner’s Manual - Diagrams and instructions at your fingertips.

Service Locator - Find service for your RV wherever you are.

Offline Mode - Download material so you have it wherever your travels take you.

Reviews and Launch

After reviewing these designs and our findings with leadership, we decided to proceed in 3 part segmented launch strategy. In the short term, we would proceed with the enhancements described above. These were built in Q3 2022.

In the long term, we would invest heavier into exploring and building out a more comprehensive user experience. I iterated on those concepts and performed a more in depth usability study to validate this direction. After that, I created a vision deck and pitched this as our 2-year vision. After receiving alignment with leadership, this became Winnebago’s first fully funded step into digitizing their customer’s experience with their vehicles.