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Transforming Onto’s app into a scalable subscription companion
My role
Product Design Lead
Company
Onto
Year
2022-2023
Overview
Onto’s app began as a utility focused primarily on keyless car access. As the business and product experience evolved to include subscription management, rewards, charging and customer support, complexity grew rapidly - without a corresponding shift in structure, usability or visual system.
The result was an increasingly fragmented experience that created friction across core tasks, reduced confidence in key features and drove unnecessary load on customer service.
The opportunity was not simply to modernise the interface, but to reposition the app as the central subscription companion - supporting customers across the full lifecycle while enabling Onto to scale efficiently.
I led the end-to-end redesign of Onto’s app, aligning product, engineering and brand to create a cohesive, scalable experience that improved engagement, reduced operational burden and established a design system foundation for future growth.
+30%
4.4*
Reframing the problem
The initial phase focused on understanding where the existing app experience was breaking down and where the greatest opportunities for impact lay. I led a discovery effort combining behavioural analytics, customer service data, UX reviews and user research to ground the redesign in real usage patterns and pain points.
Across these inputs, a consistent pattern emerged: while Onto’s feature set had grown significantly, the app still behaved like a single-purpose utility rather than a subscription platform.
Key issues included:
Fragmented information architecture that made navigation increasingly difficult
Stacked usability issues that compounded friction over time
Unreliable car data synchronisation undermining trust in core metrics
Limited in-app support, pushing customers toward costly service channels
A dated UI lacking scalability and brand cohesion
Together, these problems were not just usability concerns - they were limiting engagement, eroding confidence and increasing operational load.
The strategic shift became clear: move from a functional access app to a cohesive subscription companion that reduced friction, increased engagement, and supported customers end-to-end.
Grounding the strategy in customer behaviour
To validate and prioritise this direction, I conducted interviews and iterative testing with 16 customers, exploring jobs-to-be-done, pain points and behaviours around electric vehicle ownership and subscription management.
These sessions stress-tested early concepts and helped prioritise which areas of the experience would deliver the greatest impact.
The synthesis surfaced a set of core customer themes mapped to key jobs-to-be-done, which became a shared framework for the cross-functional team - aligning design, product and engineering around the highest-leverage problems to solve through the redesign.
Setting the strategy
I aligned the team around four high-leverage transformation goals designed to shift the app from a functional utility into a scalable subscription companion:
Simplify navigation and core journeys
Create a clear, intuitive structure that could scale with Onto’s growing feature set and reduce friction across everyday tasks.Strengthen the connection between customer and car
Improve data reliability and prioritise the information users cared about most to rebuild trust and increase engagement.Make subscription management a first-class experience
Give customers clear, flexible control over plans, rewards, and add-ons - turning the app into an active relationship management tool.Reduce cost to serve through in-app support
Shift common support needs into self-service and real-time chat to improve experience while easing operational load.
Underpinning all of this was the creation of a scalable design system to enable rapid iteration and consistency across iOS and Android.
Key journeys and features were continuously validated through user testing as the work progressed, ensuring strategic bets translated into real usability improvements.
Simplifying navigation and experience structure
The existing information architecture had grown organically, resulting in fragmentation, cognitive overload, and increasing friction across everyday tasks.
I led a complete restructuring of the app experience - combining behavioural data, card sorting, and tree testing to define a new IA and a simplified, tab-based navigation model designed to scale with Onto’s expanding feature set.
Key shifts included:
Grouping car-related actions and issue reporting into a unified support surface
Separating subscription management into a dedicated, high-visibility section
Clarifying core journeys so common tasks could be completed in fewer steps
Together, these changes created a coherent end-to-end spine for the experience, significantly improving usability and feature discoverability.
From this foundation, I progressed from low to mid-fidelity design - running ideation sessions with the product squad to explore complex journeys and stress-test interaction patterns early.
Job stories derived from customer research anchored each feature to a clear outcome, ensuring the new structure wasn’t just simpler, but meaningfully aligned to user needs.
Shaping a new UI and design system
Onto’s visual identity had been reimagined in collaboration with Ragged Edge. I translated this refreshed brand into a new component-based UI system - blending Onto’s bold visual language with a clean, functional experience built for scale.
Through exploration and iteration, I refined a cohesive visual direction that elevated the product experience while remaining highly usable across core journeys.
Alongside this, I led the creation of a new design system in close partnership with engineering. Built as shared product infrastructure, the system ensured consistency across iOS and Android, accelerated development velocity and enabled rapid experimentation without erosion of quality
The system reached 90% component coverage, becoming the foundation for ongoing product evolution and future feature delivery.
Strengthening the connection to the car
At the heart of the redesign was a new home experience centred on real-time connection to the vehicle — making the information customers cared about most immediately accessible and trustworthy. We:
Prioritised the most valuable metrics (battery level, remaining miles, location, and access)
Improved telematics synchronisation to increase reliability and rebuild confidence in live data
Refined digital key interactions to reduce dependence on physical keys and better support car sharing
Improved data accuracy alone became a major driver of satisfaction, directly contributing to higher engagement and a meaningful reduction in customer service cases.
Making subscription management a core experience
Previously, subscription features had been added piecemeal and scattered across the app. Behavioural analytics and customer testing revealed both high usage of these capabilities and their natural grouping across common customer tasks.
The redesign introduced a dedicated subscription hub that allowed customers to manage monthly plans and mileage, swap vehicles, add or remove plan bolt-ons and track and redeem rewards.
Complex backend mechanics were surfaced through a simple, transparent UI - making flexibility feel intuitive rather than burdensome.
This shift transformed the app from a passive access tool into an active relationship management platform.
An enhanced rewards experience brought incremental value and strengthened loyalty, enabling customers to clearly track and redeem points for subscription savings. Despite complex underlying systems, the flow was simplified to make redemption fast and easy.
The redesign also elevated bolt-ons as a core customisation surface. Improvements included clearer option breakdowns, a simplified detail page, and an improved auto-renewal experience - making it easier for customers to adapt their subscription as needs changed.
Embedding seamless support=
To reduce customer friction and operational load, we introduced a central support hub combining live chat, self-service help content, and enhanced car condition reporting.
Rather than isolating support in a single area, help was also embedded contextually across key journeys - surfacing guidance and escalation options exactly when users were most likely to need them.
This dual approach significantly reduced reliance on phone and email channels while improving resolution speed and overall customer satisfaction.
Outcomes
The redesign repositioned Onto’s app from a functional utility into a scalable subscription companion - improving both customer experience and business efficiency.
Engagement rose significantly, satisfaction scores improved, and support volume dropped as customers were able to self-serve more effectively and navigate core journeys with less friction.
Beyond immediate metrics, the work established a durable product foundation:
A scalable experience structure
Reliable real-time connection to the car
Flexible subscription management
A robust design system to support ongoing growth
This foundation enabled Onto to continue evolving its subscription offering with speed, confidence, and consistency.
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