Used car platform offers millions of listed vehicles in Europe, China, and the Gulf countries, allowing secure transactions and fleet management
Discovery Phase
I conducted interviews with global market users to gain deeper insights which revealed:
- Struggling to find vehicle details and could not re‐find vehicle listings
- Disoriented about the sales status
- Lack of information about the sale options
- Mistrust in the platform, no auctioning
I initiated a heuristic evaluation to gain deeper insights and to identify potential leads to grow the product. The main issues were:
- Poor findability
- Long loading times
- Unintentional dark patterns
- Lack of consistency in the design language
The dealers’ journey
The next step was to create a customer journey map to synthesize findings and align stakeholders on key priorities. This map provided a clear overview of the customer experience and highlighted critical areas for improvement, enabling the team to reach consensus on where to focus efforts.
- Reducing discovery effort
- Shortening time on listing pages
- Providing relevant information when needed
- Clarifying sales pursuits
For the browsing experience, labels were created for the product cards showing upfront information for the sale types, sale status and activity. The activity labels provided the users the ability to recognize everything regarding the vehicle sale (in auction, pending approval, pre-approval)
Searching
The next challenge was the search. It introduced two new design patterns: autosuggestand autocomplete. If this hypothesis was right, it would provide users an overview of what they could find and teach them about the structure of the search space in this case specific vehicle details and attributes.
Instilling confidence on bidding
Previously users did not have any bidding history or auctioning status information, hence users did not trust to use the auctioning feature. In order to change this, the goal for the redesign was to simplify the auctioning journey and focus in conversion. Several solutions were applied:
To understand how users thought about the different categories and what was most logical to them, I conducted a card sort with five participants. The results highlighted that we needed to add and prioritize 14 categories.
Status notifications
Track the auctioning process and display relevant notifications. Eg: if users were overbid or were highest bidder.
Bidding History
Facilitating a clear bidding overview and to build interest.
Conversion Cues
The anchoring price was added to the secondary CTA for better group semantics and easy reading A simplified countdown to create a sense of urgency to bid
Evaluation
Participants were given a set of tasks to perform with a prototype while speaking aloud their thoughts and feelings. Each participant completed the exact same set of 7 tasks. Overall impression of experience: 4.8/5 (very positive). Task rate success and user impressions showed merit to continue with design approach.
- All users were able to comprehend browse, search, filtering and auction functionality.
- Participants felt the most value in the ability to search for specifics using the search bar.
Learnings
In summary, proposed solutions appear to effectively address key user issues identified in discovery research. Continued optimization informed by user testing will strengthen the platform:
Users should be able to search for transmission, colour, VIN (full and last 7 digits), license plates
User should be able to include a mixture of key terms: E.g. E-code + drivetrain + colour
Model e-codes should be removed from auto suggestions as users do not have these memorise
4.8/5
Satisfaction Rating
100% success rate in
browsing and understanding listings
90%success rate in
searching a specific vehicle
100%success rate in
understanding new filters
100%success rate in
bidding and understanding status
Reduced Discovery Effort
Surfaced key vehicle data upfront via clear product cards, eliminating previous information fragmentation.
Increased Bidding TrustBuilt user confidence and transaction transparency through clear pricing cues, history logs, and countdown timers.
Eradicated Friction Systematically identified and removed historical dark patterns and confusing technical jargon that blocked user progress.
Business Impact
Secured Global Scalability
De-risked Engineering InvestmentProved feature merit and user viability via benchmarking prototypes before committing costly development resources.
Unified Stakeholder Alignment
Secured Global Scalability
Validated an optimized commercial engine ready to safely handle high-volume fleet transactions across Europe, China, and the Gulf countries.
De-risked Engineering Investment