Nurent set out to take car rental upmarket by stripping out everything tedious about the category: no counter, no queue, no key handover, no risk of arriving to find the wrong car waiting. The proposition was a premium vehicle delivered to your door and unlocked from your phone, built for a cosmopolitan audience that pays for quality services without a second thought. The brief asked for something state of the art, and the hard part was delivering both the autonomy of a fully self-service experience and the reassurance that nothing would go wrong with a stranger’s car and your money.
As Lead Product Designer I worked with a UX designer, a UI designer, a product researcher and a product manager, all of us contracting through Outra Coisa. We grounded the work in research: user interviews, competitor benchmarking, and a set of personas and journeys mapped across the full arc of a rental, from consideration and pickup through the in-car experience, the return and the days after. That mapping let us distil what people are really hiring a rental for, which turned out to be far more than transport: freedom and convenience, and underneath them security, status and a quiet kind of aesthetic pleasure.
The defining design decision was almost literal. The whole premium promise hinged on the moment you unlock the car from the app, so we made the brand mark itself the lock-and-unlock control: the logo is the thing you press, and the brand becomes the key. Designing the brand to unlock the experience gave the product a signature gesture no traditional rental could copy, and turned a purely functional action into something that felt considered and a little bit special.
Around that gesture we defined a set of magic moments meant to turn a dull errand into something memorable, and a flow that carried the customer through onboarding, personalised reservations and the in-car experience as one continuous service rather than a string of disconnected screens. The result was an end-to-end concept and design system a young company could build and grow on, with the experience as its edge; any rival could buy the same cars.