Acko Drive Service Centre — Product Design Case Study

00Context

What Acko Drive Service
Centre actually does

ACKO Drive Service Centre (ADSC) is Acko's own network of multi-brand car workshops — offering periodic servicing, accident repairs, denting, painting, and detailing, with transparent pricing, trained technicians, and genuine parts.

Every part of the experience is designed to run without a phone call: digital job cards replace paper estimates, a customer can approve every step from their phone, and the two things people worry about most with any garage — cost and honesty — are handled in the open, on-screen.

01

Free pick-up and drop — a rep collects the car and returns it once work is done.

02

Real-time repair tracking and estimate approval, built into the Acko app.

03

Online booking with transparent, minimal pricing — no hidden line items, no surprise add-ons.

01Problem Statement

A market that ran
on low trust

Car servicing in India wasn't short on options — it was short on honesty. Before scoping a solution, I anchored the brief in the specific ways customers had been let down by every existing option, big or small.

The Problem

Trust broke down at every step

Customers dealt with false promises, repeated the same details at every touchpoint, and had zero visibility into pricing, parts, or claims — while inconsistent local garages and fake reviews made it hard to trust any single option.

The Goal

Build the line of business Acko could stand behind

Design a car-servicing experience transparent and consistent enough for Acko to launch as a real, brand-backed line of business — not another aggregator promising more than it could show.

01

Users felt misled by false promises made before booking.

02

Repeating the same details at every step, with no memory of the customer.

03

Zero visibility into spare parts, insurance claims, and after-service support.

04

Inconsistent garage quality and fake reviews eroded trust further.

02Team & Project Details

Who was in the room

This wasn't a solo sprint — it was a cross-functional bet, run with the people who had to build, ship and back it as a real line of business.

Project details

NameAdithya Kumar Meroju

RoleProduct Designer

CompanyAcko

ProductACKO Drive Service Centre

PlatformsMobile web, Desktop web, Acko app

TimelineLate 2023 – 2025

Cross-functional team

🎨

Product Designer

Me

🧭

Design Manager

1

✍️

Content Writer

1

💻

Developers

2

📋

Product Manager

1

⭐

VP of Product

1

⚙️

CTO

1

🔍

SEO Team

Partner team

03Validate

Proving the need,
before building anything

ACKO Drive Service Centre was being scoped as a new line of business Acko wanted to build and scale — not a side experiment. Given the size of that bet, I started by forming a clear hypothesis with the team, and worked to prove customers actually wanted this before a single production screen existed.

Fake-door test

Designing a dummy entry point before designing the real one

Rather than build and launch on faith, I helped design a fake-door test: a dummy booking entry point that looked and felt like a real product, put in front of Acko's own existing users through a targeted coupon — leveraging trust and reach the brand already had, instead of paying to find users cold.

The only goal was to test the hypothesis directly: would real people take a real step toward booking a car service from Acko, before a single production screen existed.

Existing Acko users → Coupon-driven entry → Dummy booking page → Real intent measured → Demand validated

17% Click-through rate on the fake-door entry point

Hypothesis validated

Fake-door test — coming soon page and discount voucher

"Coming soon" page + discount voucher — used to measure real intent before the product existed

Grounding the validation in the real business

Understanding the garage before designing for it

Alongside the fake-door test, I ran brainstorming sessions with the CTO and engineering to align on scope, and spent time understanding the actual service business first-hand: visiting the Acko garage in person, interviewing the operations lead, booking a real service with a competitor to feel their flow, and running a teardown of how other car-service brands structure their booking journeys.

01

Visited the Acko garage with visual and content design, and interviewed the person running day-to-day operations on infrastructure and process.

02

Returned a month after launch for a second round, this time pulling real operating signals: service mix, turnaround time, and where customers hesitated.

03

Booked and sat through an actual GoMechanic service myself, to feel a competitor's flow first-hand instead of judging it from screenshots.

04

Ran a structured teardown of how the booking journey is built across Indian and international car-service brands.

Competitor teardown — where every existing player fell short, feature by feature

Garage Visit

Floor walkthrough

Interview

Garage operations

Service Bay

Infra & workflow

Site

Centre exterior, pre-launch

Raw research — the frustration patterns that shaped the two insights below

Insight 01

Customers didn't need price certainty up front — they needed logistics certainty. What stopped them wasn't "how much," it was "what happens to my car next."

Insight 02

Trust in a multi-brand garage is local, not brand-wide. A review count from a city the customer doesn't live in convinces no one.

Demand was real before a single screen was built. That gave us the confidence to launch in one city first — and design the rest as we learned.

— from my project notes

04Define

Designing a promise
that gets earned in person

With the hypothesis validated, the challenge became designing an experience that builds trust without ever showing a fixed price upfront — and doing it in a way that could scale as Acko's next line of business, not just a single city pilot.

Problem 01

Can't quote it blind

Beyond a basic periodic service, no repair can be priced without a physical inspection. A conventional "pick a package → see price → checkout" flow was off the table — it would promise something the product couldn't deliver yet.

Problem 02

Trust has to be self-serve

The flow had to work with no salesperson on a call to reassure a hesitant customer. Every ounce of trust-building had to be designed into the screen itself.

The model I designed for

One clear path from booking to service

Working closely with the CTO on feasibility, I aligned the information architecture around one honest sequence: the customer books first, the car reaches the garage, an advisor inspects it and shares a clear quote, and only once the customer approves does the work begin.

Book service → Car reaches garage → Advisor inspects → Shares quote → Customer approves → Service begins

Design goals

01Make the ask feel logistical, not transactional

02Build credibility locally — garage by garage, not brand-wide

03Design a system that scales visually without breaking consistency

05Design

Three doors in,
one honest way through

This is the core of what I designed: an information architecture, a booking flow, and a communication layer that never asks the user for a decision the product can't yet support.

IA — Entry points

Splitting the funnel by certainty, not by service

Instead of "which service do you want" — which assumes a diagnosis the customer may not have — I designed three parallel entry points based on how much the customer actually knows about their problem, and launched all three together in the first version of the product.

Garage landing page

↓

Periodic Services

Routine care

Specific Repairs

Known issue

Not Sure

Needs triage

↓

Booking flow

Wireframes — three entry points as shipped

FigJam user flow — mapping the branching logic before a single wireframe was built

Flow decision — logistics before pricing

Selling the trip to the garage, not the repair

Since no price could be shown before inspection, I designed the booking step to sell the logistics of reaching Acko, not the repair itself: Pick & Drop, where Acko collects the car, or Reserve Slot & Self-Drop, where the customer drives in. Both are effectively free to book — a refundable ₹400 hold, credited straight back into the final bill once the service is done, rather than an added cost.

That framing mattered: it turns the ask from "pay us" into "hold your spot," which is a much easier first step for someone who hasn't decided to trust you yet. The same screen sets expectations upfront — a dedicated service advisor, and free rescheduling or cancellation up to 12 hours before the slot.

Selling the trip — pick and drop vs self-drop booking

"Effectively FREE for you" — ₹400 held and adjusted into the final bill

A first for Acko

Designing the first full video-led hero section at Acko

To build credibility before asking for anything, I designed each garage's landing page around a video of that specific location — the real team, the real bay, the real process. Garage-specific video hero replacing static photography as the landing page's trust anchor.

Designing the layer around the booking

Communication, tracking and support as part of the journey

The booking itself was never the whole design problem. I designed the confirmation screen to surface the assigned garage and advisor with a direct line to talk to them, alongside a tracking view so the customer always knows what stage their car is at, and a support path for when something needs a human. All three were designed together, not bolted on after the flow shipped.

"Why are we asking users to make a payment before seeing the slots and allocated garage?"

A real question I had to answer with the screen's own copy — confirming slots were open that day and through the week, and that the preferred slot comes right after.

Launching the MVP

Shipping to one city, and reading the numbers

The first version of this flow launched in a single pilot city — deliberately small, so I could treat it as a live test rather than a finished answer.

33→55%
Visit-to-lead conversion lift after MVP launch

06Iterate

Sixteen versions,
one that shipped

Launching in a single city first meant I could treat the first release as a starting point, not a finished answer. The journey kept moving based on what real customers actually did.

The first low-fidelity wireframe for the booking flow

Version 01 — the first wireframe, before 16 rounds shaped it into the design that shipped

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05

06

07

08

09

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16

16 versions of the end-to-end journey, before the one that scaled into V1

How each version was shaped

Designing on a continuous feedback loop, not a single research phase

Rather than treat research as a one-time step before design, I kept it running through the whole build: talking to customers directly, watching session recordings, and reading heatmaps to see where people hesitated — then folding those signals back into the next version.

🗣️ User interviews ▶️ Session recordings 💬 Direct customer feedback

Where it landed — V1

What 16 iterations added up to

By the time the journey reached V1, the numbers had moved well past the MVP's early signal.

0%Uplift in serviceable-user conversion

0%Booking success rate at V1

V1 shipped

07Scale

From one city
to a design system

Once the journey held up in its first city, the design problem changed: could the same experience — and the same visual quality — hold up nationwide, as ACKO committed to this as a real line of business, without a bigger design team? As sole design owner of this phase, I partnered closely with the CTO and engineering to rebuild for scale.

0Pages live via the template system

Top 10Google ranking won for Acko Drive

▸

Revamped the end-to-end mobile and desktop IA and UI, closing the usability and content-visibility gaps I'd identified from the first city's launch.

▸

Built a modular, templatized component system specifically for city and locality pages, so new markets could be assembled repeatably instead of custom-designed one at a time.

▸

Designed and integrated an AI-generated visual pipeline in place of traditional photography, to hold consistent visual quality nationwide with no photoshoot lead time per city.

Templatization — how the system scales

One set of components, assembled per city

Rather than design each city's page individually, I broke the page into reusable modules — video hero, reviews, offers, gallery, CTA — that could be reassembled with local content and AI-generated visuals dropped in, without a designer touching each one by hand. That system is what took Acko Drive's organic pages into Google's top-10 rankings and grew organic traffic — and with it, bookings.

SEO page templates — city and locality landing pages at scale

08Screens

The complete flow,
end to end

Every screen below shipped in production — mapped end-to-end across all three journeys, from landing page to confirmed booking.

Final UI — complete booking flow screens

09Impact

What the design work
actually moved

Metrics tied directly to the design decisions above, start to finish.

0%

CTR on the fake-door test — demand validated before building

33→55%

Visit-to-lead conversion lift at MVP launch

0%

Uplift in serviceable-user conversion at V1

0%

Booking success rate at V1

0

City-level SEO pages shipped through the design system

Top 10

Google ranking — growing organic traffic and bookings

✓

Validated real demand with a fake-door test before any production design work began, de-risking the entire effort.

✓

Took the journey through 16 designed iterations — shaped by user interviews, session recordings and heatmaps — on the way to V1.

✓

Built the templatized system that took the product from a single pilot city to a 900+ page nationwide presence, ranking in Google's top 10.

10Reflect

What I'd take
into the next one

Starting with a hypothesis and a fake-door test instead of a finished product changed how I approached every decision after it — I designed the first version to be replaced, not protected. That's a big part of why there were 16 versions of the journey before the one that scaled: none of them needed to be the final answer, only the best answer available at the time.

The hardest problem here was never visual — it was designing certainty for the user when the product itself couldn't offer price certainty. Scaling from one city to a 900+ page nationwide system also changed how I think about "finished": working closely with the CTO on the templatized component system and the AI-assisted visual pipeline mattered as much to the outcome as the original flow decisions, because they're what let one designer keep pace with a new line of business growing faster than its team.

Showcasing the major and key screens here — happy to walk through the complete journey.

What Acko Drive ServiceCentre actually does

A market that ranon low trust