Overland Auto Repair
Design study for an auto repair shop whose homepage shows where your car is in the repair.
A design study. Overland Auto Repair is a made-up business, so the copy, prices and details are invented to show how the design works.
Overview
Project overview
A made-up independent repair shop in Wilmington. Customers want to know where their car is and what it will cost, so the homepage opens on a ticket lookup that walks the car through each stage of the repair, next to a price table with the labor rate posted.
Approach
How I approached it
This is a design study for an auto repair shop I made up. The two things people want from a repair shop’s website are where their car is and what it’s going to cost, so the homepage starts with a repair order. Type in the ticket number from the drop-off text and a small car drives along a road through each stage of the repair, from checked in to ready for pickup, with the time and a short note at each stop.
The rest of the page is about trusting the price. The labor rate is posted in large type next to a table of common jobs, and every total in it is the parts range plus the labor hours at $135. The estimate on the demo repair order uses those same hours and that same rate, so the tracker and the price table back each other up.
The look comes from the shop itself. Headings are stenciled like the lettering on a garage wall, and the prices and shop rules are set as tables with hard black rules, the way a service manual prints its specs. Orange is saved for the buttons and for status, like the open sign and the stage the car is at now.
What was delivered
Deliverables
- A "Check on your car" lookup at the top of the page: enter a ticket number and the car drives through checked in, diagnosing, waiting on parts, repairing and ready for pickup, with a time and a note at each stage
- The technician's note and the approved estimate on the same repair order, line by line, with the approved total
- A price table for six common jobs showing the parts range, the labor hours and the total before tax, with the $135 labor rate posted beside it
- The shop's rules set out as a spec sheet, led by the promise to call before any work over the estimate
- A drop-off booking form laid out like a paper slip, which won't take a Sunday or a date in the past
Key decisions
- Stenciled headings like the lettering painted on a shop wall, over plain condensed tables that read like a service manual
- Safety orange appears only on buttons and on status, such as the current stage and the stretch of road the car has already covered
- The demo repair order uses the same labor hours and rate as the price table, so the estimate and the published prices agree