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UX DESIGN EXAMPLES

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Case Study

The Challenge

Automotive dealerships needed a fast and accurate way to assess and report damage on a vehicle, enter other required information and create and share a professional, standardized Vehicle Condition Report package.

User Research

I researched automotive products that car dealers used for various tasks in their workflow to understand the design and functionality they were familiar with. I conducted interviews with used car dealers and ‘shadowed’ them on the car lot to really understand their daily workflow. I needed to understand:

• What is the user’s current process?
• What do they like and dislike about their process?
• What does the app have to do to be adopted into their daily workflow?

Dealer for a Day (or a few days)

I conducted extensive user research by ‘shadowing’ various dealers on used car lots as they performed ‘walk-arounds’ on vehicles to report damage and create condition reports. I asked what their pain points were and learned their behavior and workflow. I brought this valuable research back to the Product Team and the collaboration began. I decided on an approach which consisted of rapid sketching and prototyping that we could go to dealers with to get feedback. Collaboration between Product, Engineering and Customer Support, sparked fantastic ideas and allowed us to prioritize a phased released strategy based on what was required in the application vs what was ‘nice to have’.

Analysis

I discovered used car dealers are very set in their ways and locked into a process they have used for many years. Injecting new tools into their workflow was challenging. An additional challenge was that most users were not tech savvy so the app had to be simple and not intimidating. It also needed to work seamlessly across platforms. My research identified 3 key areas that were important to the user:

Speed: The app must speed up their current process and cannot feel like a disruption. It must be intuitive and require no training.
Accuracy/Transparency: The app must deliver accurate damage values and store all the required information in a secure, time-stamped file.
Accessibility: Information must be easily recalled, emailed, printed and shared and be a fully integrated cross-platform solution so they could save a session on mobile and complete it on desktop.

The Design

Testing and High-fidelity Design

Improvements

• In almost all cases, users were answering ‘no’ to the disclosure questions, so I pre-selected those answers to
  'no' to speed up the process.
• I initially used a generic pancake diagram that represented ‘car’, ‘truck’, ‘van’ but discovered users felt it was more accurate if the diagram closer resembled the actual model of the vehicle. More diagrams were added and selected based on the VIN of the vehicle.
• Animation was used for calls to action (take photo, print) as a slide up from the bottom of the screen. This increased visibility and success rates of completing those actions when required.
• Users were trying to advance to the next screen without clicking the Save icon. We decided an auto-save feature made sense, given the distractions and busy environment the users were working in.

Game Changer

I was confident we improved the accuracy and organization of the user’s process in creating a condition report. And when tested, reporting damage and answering disclosure questions were within the time range parameter we set as a goal. However, initial set up of the vehicle details (year, make, model, trim, VIN) was slow, manual entry. The Engineering team worked on developing a VIN SCAN function. It was decided that the product could not be released without that time-saver. Once the VIN scan was added to the app, all the vehicle details could be auto-populated.