My Role
Led 0→1 automotive e-commerce design & research, simplifying a complex, information-dense experience for customers selling or trading in vehicles online.
Problem
Data revealed that users dropped off in contact forms, uploading documents, and booking appointments. This helped us identify which onboarding steps were the primary for focus.
A primary customer archetype and customer journey map was created to simplify and synthesize the information we gathered from the 20 interview participants.
The journey to arrive at the vehicle cash offer was tedious and confusing. I collaborated with product and engineering to determine which steps we could remove to simplify the onboarding process. The defined chart seen below helped us remove 3 pages in the vehicle sell and trade flow.
The original landing page did not clearly communicate trust or clear value, resulting in lower user confidence and confusion about the process. We updated the landing page to provide a focus on simplified instructions and brand recognition for credibility.
A scheduling application was built to provide full control of the home pick up or dealership location appointment times. The interface was designed to be consistent with our design system patterns and personalized with geolocation services for assisted task completion.
The file uploader replaced overnight mailing, eliminating a major pain point for sellers and the business. Research showed missing signatures and info delayed sales, so we added instant discrepancy alerts and status tracking to speed up paperwork. The feature empowered sellers to upload documents and photos on their own time and saved the company $100K+ in mail document costs.
We partnered with US Bank to design an instant payment system for online vehicle sales, replacing multi-day check pickups that caused frustration. Research identified delayed payments as a major friction point, so we validated secure, complex flows through A/B testing and analytics to ensure trust and usability.
Driveway becomes first online car dealership to pay customers via real-time payments- Nasdaq.com
Driveway's new 'real-time payment' option available 24/7 could give them competitive advantage- autonews.com
Learnings
Optimizing the entire “Sell & Trade-In“ experience helped me learn how to manage an aggressive 9 month roadmap of highly impactful features and exercise lean UX design. Facilitating collaborations early and often to focus on the problem statement was important for the team to move quickly through iterations. I gained a lot of personal experience leading meetings to achieve desired outcomes and articulate our customers' needs into the process. I had to think beyond design and learn a depth of empathy for our engineers.
The easiest solution was the most impactful improvement. It proves that micro and macro observations are important for exploring ideas. We learned that most vehicle sellers are comparison shoppers that constantly use fake contact information. We did an A/B test of simply moving the email and phone contact form after the vehicle cash offer page which resulted in a major increase for quality leads. Vehicle sellers have been given an incentive to provide real information when they're offered a cash offer first. All additional requests for personal information before the cash offer page was also removed which improved task completion rates.
