Design a fully digital, self-service rental pickup experience across all three brands — Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty — that would let customers skip the counter entirely. The experience needed to handle identity verification, last-minute add-ons, car selection, payment review, and damage assessment, all while accounting for the complexity of different airports, booking types, and fleet availability.

• Wireframed & designed 120+ screens for the platform covering happy paths and edge cases, giving developers a complete interaction reference.

   

• Built 15 SMS and 21 email communications to keep customers informed throughout their entire rental journey.

   

• Coordinated across 9+ internal departments to account for operational, legal, fleet, and brand requirements across all three brands.

   

• Incorporated a damage assessment flow and identity verification step to reduce fraud and protect the business at scale.

   

• Actively monitored post-launch performance through A/B testing, tracking drop-off, bounce rates, errors, and adoption.

• Refinement continued where users were dropping off, submitting incorrect forms, or abandoning before pages even loaded. The key is understanding why and then applying pressure where the leak is.

VAS products — insurance, liability protection, and health coverage — were being sold primarily at the counter, costing the company millions in commissions. The goal was to shift that revenue to digital by redesigning the VAS experience across iOS, Android, and the white-label website to improve clarity, transparency, and adoption.

• Split Protection and Extras into their own dedicated pages within the booking flow, reducing cognitive load and improving focus.

• Added transparency layers that clearly explained what each protection product covers, building customer confidence before checkout.

• Rolled the same design system into the white-label website, creating a consistent experience across all platforms.

• Shifted LDW revenue by +760ppt from counter to digital between April and August — the design was later replicated by a major competitor.

A significant number of customers were skipping LDW protection without fully understanding what they were declining. The ask was to create a last-chance intervention in the booking flow that would educate users on the value of LDW and give them one more opportunity to add it before completing their reservation.

• Designed a modal that triggers when a user attempts to skip LDW, surfacing the key benefits in a clear, non-intrusive way.

• Incorporated social proof — showing how many other customers had added the product — to reduce hesitation through validation.

• Kept the experience frictionless: one tap to add, one tap to continue without — no guilt trip, just clarity.

Increase VAS adoption by making customers feel more confident in their decision to add protection products, using the behavior of other renters as a real-time trust signal across Hertz.com, iOS, and Android.

• Designed a social proof component that surfaced how many other customers had added VAS products to their rental, displayed contextually within the booking flow.

• Added a subtle animated indicator — a pulsing dot behind the number — to make the count feel live and active rather than static, increasing visual attention.

• Ran as a structured A/B test across all three platforms to validate impact before full rollout.

Step back from individual features and design the future of the entire Hertz rental experience — from the moment a customer shops for a car to the moment they return it. This was a strategic concepting initiative to define the vision that would guide product direction through 2024 and 2025.

• Spent 1.5 months in pure ideation and concepting with the UI/UX team, conducting interviews with department leaders across the business to surface real pain points.

• Synthesized research into a unified vision covering every stage of the rental lifecycle: Shop & Book, Post-Booking Modification, Day of Rent, On Rent, Return, and Post-Return.

• Delivered designs and a working prototype that served as the strategic north star for all ongoing product work going into 2025.

• Focused the vision on three outcomes: higher NPS, stronger customer retention, and revenue growth across all touchpoints.

Feel free to contact me with any inquiries or questions!