How Safe Is Your Car?

In 2019, 232 people lost their lives on Victorian roads. The TAC and the Victorian Government believe that zero can be the only acceptable number of deaths on our roads. We can all make a difference. By driving at safer speeds, making safe decisions, building safer roads and by choosing safer cars we can bring that number down. The challenge presented to Inlight was how do we get people to choose safer cars by bringing together the abundance of existing car data available to everyday people and present it in a way that’s easily understood and useful?

HSIYC wanted an easy to maintain website that collated data from ANCAP, Redbook and Vicroads, presenting it in a digestible way. You don't have to be a car expert to find a suitable safe car. Consumers can narrow down the results based on budget, lifestyle and other important factors. The success of the site was dependent on making smart choices about what data to present and how to engage people with it. For the site administrators, it was important to develop a site that was easy to manage, allowing them to keep data up-to-date and accurate.

Statistically if everyone could drive the safest car in each category, (eg hatchbacks, sedans, SUVs) road deaths and serious injury would drop by an estimated 26%. In 2019 that could have been 60 more people safe at home with their families. HSIYC disproves that safe cars are only accessible to those wealthy enough to purchase a certain type of vehicle. The site makes safe vehicle choices accessible to everyone, regardless of budget or lifestyle. Our work with HSIYC will directly move towards reducing the Victorian road toll and will continue to do so year after year.

User research was conducted in two rounds: - One-on-one interviews to gauge understanding and collect qualitative feedback on credibility and site purpose and; - A more rapid round of remote testing done at scale to test functionality and use of interactive elements. During our research we learnt that people were more likely to upgrade to a newer model of their same car, they weren’t sure what the exact model of their car was, and few people were aware of lesser known safety features. We learnt exactly where on the site to present safety information to increase the user comprehension and uptake of information, an important finding to help achieve HSIYC’s mission. The existing dataset was huge, consisting of over 75,000 vehicle records and close to 1 million associations with safety features. Great UI allowed a lot of complexity, breadth of data and business logic in the back-end to be translated seamlessly and conveyed simply in the front-end. We optimised our infrastructure, ensuring reliable processing and fast response times. Custom import scripts take care of incoming data such as newly released vehicles and safety test reports, intelligently making associations between them. Thoughtful choice of content management system dramatically improved content managers’ experience.