PayPal - Pay at the Pump

Field research: In 2016 I led a research team, our mission statement: Discover the true customer problem at gas stations and do a first round of solution discovery to generate customer insights. First I facilitated a session with our team, where, based on our own assumptions we mapped out a proto-journey map for customers paying for petrol at a gas station.

Using our proto-journey map we identified key assumptions and then based on their risk to the project, decided which to focus our research on.

Over two days at two separate gas stations in and around Berlin we began to gathered our research though field observations and customer interviews.

As well as pure problem discovery we hoped to understand if there was a need in the German market for an existing US solution where customers could pay at the pump with out having to enter the shop. This is done using a mobile phone and posters on the forecourt with QR codes.

I decided that a great, quick and lean way to discover if German customers showed interest in the product would be to best way to answer this question. So I created posters to go next the pumps advertising a fully functional solution. This linked to a PayPal website, that explains this functionality wasn’t quite ready yet. As compensation give the customer a 5 EUR voucher they can use for their petrol. By simply measuring the frequency of use we could gain an understanding about the desire for the product.