Maya

Maya is an innovative new way to purchase car tyres online. With a simple process built entirely around the customer, Maya provides independent and expert tyre recommendations, as well as options for local fitting.

The team at Maya approached Gravitywell with a passion to revolutionise online tyre retail. Anyone who has purchased a tyre online won’t be surprised to learn that it’s an industry plagued by horrible customer experiences. From the adverts, promotions and deals that are in the best interest of the retailer rather than the customer, to the bewildering process itself, which routinely assumes that the user knows about tyres!

Another undeniable reality for the industry is that, put simply, no one wants to buy tyres. The act of purchasing a tyre is reactive rather than proactive — it’s fixing a problem that has to be fixed. Nobody window shops for a car tyre. So, the challenge for a disruptor like Maya is to make a typically arduous process as painless as possible. A key part of this process is the removal of unnecessary choice. Most customers don’t know anything about tyres, so why are they expected to scroll through dozens of options to find the right one?

Therefore, we designed a simple, clean, modern ‘digital concierge’ experience that doesn’t leave the technical decisions up to the customer. After all, safety is paramount when purchasing a tyre — buying the right one for your specific car model is crucial.

The brand itself is also a bold step away from the rest of the industry that focuses on a stereotypically ‘car-obsessed bloke’ persona. Maya is for the rest of us; we want safety, we want good advice and we want a simple and trustworthy experience.

One of the challenges we faced during production was the seemingly endless combinations of vehicles, potential tyre sizes and tyre technologies which needed to be filtered down in order to deliver the single right tyre. Our intelligent solutions form part of Maya’s USPs and are the foundations for more innovation in the future.

We created ‘design system’ which allowed us to create and modify a prototype without lots of design iteration. Then we were able to rigorously test the tyre-matching flow, discover edge cases and find out the best way to narrow down the specification of tyre without bombarding the user with questions. The end result; a journey which asks the right questions at the right time, removing incompatible tyres until the perfect tyre remains. Compare this to competitors that provide a screen with up to 500 results, and you see the value of good, patient, User-centered design.

Once we'd used the prototype to hone in on the optimal user experience, we went about creating a slick, polished app using Next.js to pre-render static pages for a blazingly fast UX, inserting dynamic content into templates where necessary.

As far as revolutionising the online tyre industry goes, we’ve made huge leaps forward. Considerable work has gone into making Maya intelligent and able to narrow down the right product for the customer from the thousands of options on the market. Maya continues to improve the full tyre-purchasing experience (including fitting), as well as other driving services in the future.

Trust Maya and say hello to the open road: trustmaya.com

To learn more about how Gravitywell can help with the design and development of your software platform, get in touch.