Redesigning the used car
sales experience
Global Automotive Leader used car platform offers million of listed vehicles on its platform in Europe, China, and the Gulf countries. The marketplace allows car dealers to offer their car stock for second-hand sale. The key business embraces dealer transactions and fleet management.
Discovery Phrase
I initiated a heuristic evaluation to gain deeper insights and to identify potential leads to grow the product. The main issues were:
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
I also conducted interviews with global market users to gain deeper insights which revealed:
- Were struggling to find vehicle details and could not re‐find vehicle listings
- Felt disoriented about the sales status
- Had a lack of information about the sale options
- Had a big mistrust in the platform, hence they were not auctioning
Moving forward with the journey
The next step was to creat the customer journey map to synthesized findings, facilitating stakeholder alignment on
priority areas:
The next step was to creat the customer journey map to synthesized findings, facilitating stakeholder alignment on
priority areas:
- Reducing discovery effort
- Shortening time on listing pages
- Providing relevant information when needed
- Clarifying sales pursuits
- Instilling purchase confidence
For the browsing experience, Iabels 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.
- To track the auctioning process and to receive relevant notifications. Eg: if users were overbid or were highest bidder.
Focus in conversion cues
- The anchoring price was added to the secondary CTA for better group semantics and easy reading
- A simplied countown to create a sense of urgency to bid
Bidding History
- Facilitating a clear bidding overview and to build interest.
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: 4.5/5 (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 memorised