Evolving customer experience through UX best practice & establishing a vision for a future beyond just breakdowns

areas of expertise

ux research & experience mapping

human centred design

Growth design

product & design strategy

service design

ui & interaction design

rapid prototyping

A man holding an iphone, displaying an app helping him navigate to saved locations and access useful vehicle utility, while sat in a car

The AA was originally formed in June 1905 by a group of passionate motoring enthusiasts. Since its inception, the AA has been committed to protecting motorists and prioritising their interests. With over 15 million members, it has since become the largest motoring organisation in the UK.

With a range of teams and a growing selection of services, all dependent upon a fairly small UX & Design team, the organisation had spent a number of years trying to scale its own proposition, integrate new service lines and develop a systemised approach to its approach to product and service development.

overview

When we were approached, the AA were struggling in a number of areas, spread across their entire business, but ultimately leaning upon an already stretched and struggling UX & Design team. Our partnership was initially centred around embedding UX best practice and strengthening the capabilities of the team, with the remit to also utilise and extend existing customer research as a benchmark for innovation that could help evolve their core services.

The focus here was to develop a vision and roadmap for their primary digital touchpoints, future proofing the organisation and helping map out potential partnership opportunities for business growth and evolving utility. Beyond the main services of the organisation, we were also tasked with integrating a number of new services into the existing user journeys, ensuring seamless onboarding and adoption into The AA CX stack.

challenges, goals & focus areas

Unstick the UX & Design Team, setting the internal standard for research, design & innovation.

Working closely with the Head of Design & their current team, we needed to collaborate on priorities, analysing current work practices while helping develop a foundational system for consistency, and looking closely at improving and evolving the core breakdown and call-centre support experiences.

Establish and prototype a vision and future for The AA, creating motorist utility beyond just breakdowns.

Collaborating with team leads from across the business & reporting in to the CEO, we needed to review, validate and augment existing customer research. This was needed so that we could plan, design and prototype a working future vision, evolving the digital utility in their breakdown app to future proof the organisation.

Integrating a range of new services, including used cars, finance & insurance, into The AA digital service stack.

Applying best practice UX processes to several new service acquisitions, so that we could help evolve the design system, accommodating new functionality, while mapping out critical journeys and user pathways, so that each service could be seamlessly integrated into the existing AA experience architecture.

our approach & insights discovered

The ultimate goal was to reduce driver friction, but we were also aware of just how much information and interface challenge call centre responders have to cope with at the same time. Taking a role-agnostic, human-centred approach allowed us to gauge and prioritise the right challenges and be far more flexible.

Early discovery revealed several realities we needed to help the AA navigate. The UX team were stretched thin, dealing with legacy tooling, competing priorities, and the difficulty of demonstrating value in an organisation used to shipping quickly rather than testing thoroughly. Customer research existed, but varied in quality, making it hard to connect behaviour insights to product decisions. And while there were pockets of innovative thinking in the business, there was no single, aligned vision of what the AA’s digital future should be.

To bring clarity, we ran diagnostic sessions across squads, mapped internal and external frictions, and reviewed years of accumulated design debt. This involved observing call-centre workflows, analysing driver behaviour in breakdown moments, and shadowing teams responsible for new services entering the ecosystem. Patterns began to emerge: duplicated effort, misaligned KPIs, multi-step journeys that could be halved, and good ideas stuck in limbo because the cross-functional pathways to deliver them weren’t clear.

We introduced impact–effort prioritisation to help the AA cut through noise and focus on improvements with the highest combined value for customers, responders and internal teams. This allowed us to highlight hidden blockers, such as unclear ownership of certain journeys, legacy constraints on the app’s information architecture, and the fact that adding new services (used cars, finance, warranties) was forcing the digital estate to stretch beyond what it had ever been designed for. These insights shaped not just what we tackled first, but how the organisation needed to operate to keep improving.

The outcome of this discovery phase wasn’t just a list of problems, it was a shared understanding. A clearer picture of what really gets in the way for drivers in stressful moments. A better sense of how complex a responder’s job is behind the scenes. And a recognition across stakeholders that The AA needed a more coherent system, a more confident design team, and a future vision robust enough to absorb new services without breaking the experience for millions of motorists.

A woman takes a closer look at a cluster of customer and service frictions on a large journey map, placed on the wall of an office.

A woman unrolls a porton of a large journey map on a table, showing key customer stages and clusters of frictions underneath an anxiety scale.

The solution

Strengthening The AA’s design capability, while delivering critical improvements across their core digital services and future strategy, meant becoming invisible as a separate team. It required being part of the organisation, living and breathing the same problems day to day and collaborating through a wide variety of solution concepts, sweating the details and mucking in.

We worked hands-on with The AA’s UX and Design team to unblock delivery, introduce modern design standards, and build a consistent foundation for research, workflow management and decision-making. Alongside this capability uplift, we redesigned the Report a Breakdown experience, streamlining the digital journey for drivers during high-stress moments and improving the information flow used by call-centre responders. This work went on to win a UXUK Award for its measurable impact on both customer experience and operational efficiency.

We also developed a suite of white-label service variants that enabled The AA to form new breakdown partnerships with automotive manufacturers from Ford to Mercedes and McLaren. This included rapid concepting, adaptive UX patterns, and pitch-readiness materials to help internal teams demonstrate value and secure partnerships.

To support long-term strategic planning, we then scoped, designed and built a fully functioning prototype of The AA’s future digital vision, a unified model for how drivers might manage breakdowns, vehicle health, finance, insurance, and ownership tasks within a single connected ecosystem. This prototype was used by senior executives to align on investment priorities and define the next horizon of AA services.

As The AA expanded into new commercial areas, we also integrated new functionality stacks into their digital estate, from used-car search to finance pathways, warranties and insurance tooling. Working closely with newly acquired business units, we helped translate their propositions into coherent, AA-branded journeys that fit seamlessly within existing infrastructure and the evolved design system.

impact

£229m

in revenue

Designed and implemented the AA’s digital Insurance interface, reporting a 4.4% year-on-year revenue increase to £229 million as of March 2024

150k+

used cars online

The AA Cars platform now lists over 150,000 used cars online, making it one of the UK’s largest digital car marketplaces

70%

manufacturers in partnership

The AA is now working with 70% of UK manufacturers via its white label services, established and initiated through our partnership.

car home future vision

Digital innovation strategy & roadmap

The 'Car Home' prototype & initiative laid the groundwork for The AA's digital future. We explored ways to enhance every aspect of driving, positioning The AA as the primary car assistance service.

Through comprehensive design and prototyping, we demonstrated The AA's potential to become integral to drivers' lives, setting a foundation for digital innovation within the organisation.

improved digital ux & best practice

Award-winning digital experiences

Our work contributed to The AA winning the UX/UK award for the 'Report a Breakdown' service. This award-winning product was slated for launch in early 2019, establishing a new benchmark for future digital customer experience integrations and winning new service partnerships with brands like Ford. This success not only validated our approach but also set a new standard for digital innovation within The AA.

used cars service integration

Integrated new business into core CX

We collaborated with The AA's 'Cars' team to simplify the car finance process and integrate their journeys into the core AA CX. Our focus was on helping users find their ideal vehicle while understanding finance options at key decision points. We also provided the team with a versatile toolkit and design components to enhance their workflow. This approach simplified the car buying journey and empowered The AA to begin continuously improving their digital offering.