A more transparent experience for car buyers
How might we improve trust between car buyers and dealers? We helped a car company transform into a more customer-centric company.
*Client and work have been sanitized for confidentiality purposes
On this project my role was lead designer. I was in charge of creating and managing the workplan for the design workstream, including planning design sprints, testing protocols, user testing with participants, aligning stakeholders, and presenting ongoing work to the the leadership and working team in Sprint Reviews.
I also mentored another designer from the client's preferred agency on user testing and research and successfully transitioned the project to her to develop the prototype with her agency. They are now building these features in the current website.
Customer Journey Mapping
I started the project on one workstream, building an entire customer journey map of the end to end experience of buying a car. With the variety of steps that a customer could take including, learning about cars from different resources, financing or leasing a car, servicing their car, etc. During a 3 hour workshop with 4 clients with over 50 years of experience, we identified a customer and their journey as well as we identified an extreme user— someone that was overly nervous about buying a car — and built out their entire journey and pain points they had.
Building trust into the design
After building out a large journey map, I mentored a consultant on how to iterate on this journey map, while I transitioned to another team to help develop solutions for the most painful experience on the journey map, the dealer negotiation process.
I worked with someone from the client's market research team to source participants to user test with. For the first round of user testing we worked with internal employees due to a one week turnaround to test the solutions. We choose participants that had bought a car in the last year. I used paper prototyping, so the sessions could be more co-creative.
Understanding trust through interviews
I made low fidelity wireframes based on the co-creation sessions to test with 10 consumers. I used the first part of the interview to ask questions about their recent buying experience with the dealership and the second part to ask questions about the wireframe.
After prototyping and testing a variety of different solutions we found that trust was really about our users feeling in control.
trust = feeling in control
This took the form in our car buyers needing to know:
- How much they would pay, not just for the car, but also with financing terms accounted for.
- Which features they were getting for the car. Trims are often not specific enough for consumers to easily understand the features they would be getting.
- Ability to contact the dealers on their own terms, without giving up their information and without the dealers hounding them about coming in to see the cars.