Modernizing the vehicle repairs experience for Garage.co.uk
Influize joined forces with Garage.co.uk, a bold new venture from New Reg Ltd, to design a responsive, customer-first website that reimagines how drivers book local garage services. In just three months, we built a fully integrated platform that simplifies quoting, booking, and service management from end to end.
Overview/Background
A full-service website in just 9 months.
Garage.co.uk, a startup backed by New Reg Ltd, wanted to launch a frictionless digital experience for booking vehicle services. For that, they needed a scalable, mobile-friendly, user-centric platform to serve drivers, garages, and internal teams alike. Influize built a fully responsive, multi-role system with more than 100 pages from the ground up, with no legacy infrastructure. It was complete with dashboards for customers, garages, and admins, plus backend software for booking management on both ends.
The vision was simple but ambitious:
Make it easier for people to find, book, and manage vehicle services online. Garage.co.uk needed a sleek, responsive website with powerful back-end dashboards to connect customers with garages and streamline the entire booking journey. We architected a system with role-based logic, real-time data sync, and modular components to support future growth. Every user flow — from quoting to post-service feedback — was mapped, tested, and optimized for speed and trust.
The Challenge
More Than a Website — A Seamless System
As a brand-new digital product, Garage.co.uk started from scratch: no legacy tech, no pre-built tools, and no prior user base. This gave us a rare chance to design without constraints, but it also meant building every element of the platform without much to go on. Pair that with tight timelines, high expectations, and the need to build something scalable while staying lean? "Tough" would be an understatement.
Drivers and garages hadn't used a solution like this before
The auto repair industry has shockingly few intuitive online solutions, making this a rare (yet profitable) opportunity to innovate. It also meant we had immense pressure to create an intuitive UX that drivers could use like any other app on their phone. At the same time, we needed near-total adoption from thousands of garages all across the UK, or else there'd be no reason for drivers to use it. So we had to relentlessly focus on ease of use for the task-based backend as well.
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The Influize Approach
Laying the groundwork
Before anything, we went deep into discovery. We kicked things off with stakeholder interviews, heuristic evaluations, and a competitive UX audit to uncover functional gaps in the existing auto repair booking landscape. Our team moderated a series of focus groups and cross-functional workshops with Garage.co.uk’s internal teams, to align around user behavior, business goals, and technical constraints so nothing would get lost halfway through the build.
Strategy before screens
From there, we built user flow diagrams, service blueprints, and a prioritized product requirements document (PRD) to align technical constraints with their objectives. To model user journeys, we used task analysis and journey modeling to visualize the digital touchpoints, plus offline pain points. We then scored features based on impact vs. effort and developed a phased product roadmap to get max ROI from the launch day.
Design and execution
Cross-Team Collaboration Done Right
Building something this layered meant getting design, dev, and business logic to work together in sync. So we ran the build like we meant it: tight sprints, shared ownership, and no surprises. We worked in agile sprints with backlog grooming, biweekly sprint planning, and hands-on stakeholder reviews baked into the process. And with QA checklists and design tokens, we kept a tight feedback loop.
Shipping fast doesn't mean cutting corners.
Prototypes were built in Figma using structured component libraries and variant logic. Heatmapping and A/B testing ran through Maze. On the engineering side, the front end was fully modular, component-based from the ground up to scale across user types (driver, garage, admin). The garage dashboard ran on event-driven architecture to facilitate real-time quoting, and we built a custom calendar module with availability logic to eliminate booking conflicts before they happened.
The Results
Strong early wins
In October 2024, we successfully brought Garage.co.uk’s vision to life with a sleek, responsive platform. Customers can now easily find and book services on mobile or desktop, while garages enjoy a seamless system to manage and track bookings. The intuitive design reduces confusion at every level. For admins, the platform delivers real-time visibility and full control, ensuring a smooth experience across the board for every user involved.
The results confirmed exactly what we were expecting
Within 3 weeks of launch, we saw higher visitor retention compared to initial benchmarks, lower bounce rates, and seamless cross-device usage, with mobile accounting for more than half of the traffic. When we spoke with actual users, our focus group members cited "simplicity," "navigability," and "trustworthiness" as reasons they'd use it again.
Key Takeaways
Putting Users First from Day One
Garage.co.uk's project reinforced what we learned in Web Design 101: that putting users first is the difference between a product that's a hit from day one and a product that never gets off the ground. Discovery work, real user testing, and iterative design gave us a clear path forward. It helped us catch blind spots early, get the project done on time, and made the final product feel intuitive from the very first click.
Success factors
Three things made this work: a relentless focus on mobile-first design, a dashboard-driven architecture that could scale, and a process grounded in how real people actually use the product. That’s what turned a blank slate into a fully functional, market-ready platform in just nine months.
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Lasting impressions
Garage.co.uk’s leadership was deeply impressed by the project’s outstanding outcome, with CEO Steven Jackson OBE expressing heartfelt appreciation for Influize’s exceptional work. He highlighted the platform’s seamless balance of striking visual appeal and intuitive usability, which captivated users and elevated the brand’s presence. The thoughtfully crafted design not only met but surpassed expectations, reinforcing Garage.co.uk’s industry leadership and fostering greater user engagement, setting a new standard for their digital experience.
In their words
"The design Influize delivered exceeded our expectations, creating a platform that’s not only visually stunning but incredibly easy to use. They captured our goal of making garage bookings simple and trusted from the outset. It’s given us a strong start as a new brand, and we couldn’t be happier with the result."
STEVEN JACKSON
FOUNDER & GARAGE.CO.UK
