Project № 03
BMW Motorrad
From product-specific fixes to systemic service design — a six-week UX audit of Rent A Ride, in service of BMW's Rent-to-Own strategy.
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From product-specific fixes to systemic service design — a six-week UX audit of Rent A Ride, in service of BMW's Rent-to-Own strategy.
BMW Motorrad Rent A Ride is the BMW Group's motorcycle rental platform — a public-facing booking site plus a dealer portal that lets authorised BMW dealers manage the fleet, process requests and handle the hand-off. The product sits at the centre of a strategic bet: Rent-to-Own. Turn a one-weekend renter into the owner of a new BMW motorcycle.
I was brought in as Lead UX Auditor to evaluate the usability and performance of both sides — public site and dealer portal — and to align the findings against that Rent-to-Own goal. Two weeks of preparation, four weeks of direct engagement with the product team in Munich and counterparts across Europe.
When a product team asks for a UX audit, they usually expect a list of 20–30 things to fix by the next sprint. That list is real and I delivered it. But the bigger finding — the one the board needed to hear — was that Rent A Ride was not a booking product problem. It was a service design problem.
Booking drop-offs were happening because the workflow was complex, the dealer portal was misaligned with how dealers actually worked, and the public site treated a rental as a transaction instead of the first step of a relationship.
My recommendation re-framed the conversation. Simplify the booking process, yes. Add dynamic filters and predictive search, yes. But also: imagine a Rent A Ride 2.0 that treats the rider like Airbnb treats its guests and like Riderly treats its enthusiast community. Inspiration benchmarks, not copy-paste, anchored to BMW's premium positioning.
This re-frame shifted the client's focus from product-specific fixes to addressing the systemic service design challenges that made the Rent-to-Own strategy hard to execute in the first place.
Six stakeholder interviews across European markets — Germany, Spain and beyond — surfacing the dealer experience, key accounts' expectations, and the gaps between the product team's model of the world and the actual one on the ground. Sessions captured in FigJam for asynchronous synthesis.
Six competitive usability sessions with diverse users evaluating BMW Rent A Ride against direct and indirect competition. In parallel, two years of Adobe Analytics and EPM Qlik data reviewed to isolate where the numbers actually broke — not where we guessed they did.
Developed a set of proto-personas (Alex Özdemir, Amara Chike, Juan Ramos, Karl Beck, Lisa Chen, Rami El-Khouri) and mapped the full information architecture across public site and dealer portal — the baseline needed before any redesign vocabulary could land.
A two-hour Findings & Insights session on 13 December 2024 walked the product team through every observation, friction point and recommendation. 23 reports, 27 videos, 51 prioritised tasks, with 10 short-term wins flagged for immediate implementation.
The audit shifted the client's focus from product-specific fixes to addressing systemic service design challenges, delivering a strategic vision for a premium, user-centered Rent A Ride 2.0. — BMW Motorrad Rent A Ride · Audit summary
Selected captures from the six-week engagement — timeline, research tooling, usability sessions, and the final findings presentation delivered to the product team.
Concrete deliverables, as captured in the final audit report handed to BMW Motorrad on 13 December 2024.
The most valuable thing a UX audit can do is not the list of fixes. It is the re-frame. BMW's product team came to the engagement asking "what should we fix in the booking flow". The audit's real contribution was to say, gently but clearly, that was the wrong question — the Rent-to-Own strategy lived or died on whether Rent A Ride was a product or a service, and the answer had to be a service.
Deep thanks to the BMW Motorrad Rent A Ride product team in Munich — Christina Flügler, Edney Imme, Marion Suppes, Nasar Faraaz and Umut Oezleyen — whose trust and collaboration made the re-frame possible. Read 4 referrals for this role on LinkedIn →