Client: Lithia Motors
How might we reimagine the way Americans buy, sell, and trade cars?
2019-2020 — Digital Service Design
Driveway
Role: Product Design Lead, Researcher
Client: Lithia Motors
The dealership model is broken. Customer feedback had been stacked on the desks at Lithia Motors for years. Lithia is a company built from an entire network of used car dealerships across the nation, lending a superior leg-up on its main competitor in the digital car-buying space, Carvana. The dealership model was proven to suck. The sales and valuation process felt like a mirage to customers, a hidden series of steps that led to inevitable buyer’s remorse due to distrust and confusion.
So, let’s reimagine the customer experience and service delivery of buying and selling cars. Our team of engineers, product managers, designers, and technologists were tasked with the entirety of designing and delivering the infrastructure of a new service that enables completing every step of the process online. The best part, full transparency for the car buyer. No more sales persona that isn’t trustworthy. Driveway became a robust combination of processes and digital touchpoints designed and built with its core users at the center of all.
In this case study you will see:
Setting foundation
User testing of vehicle valuation iPad app
User testing and design decisions of Baierl.com (MVP of Driveway.com)
Setting foundation
When it comes to digitizing the services involved with evaluating, trading, selling, and buying cars — it’s imperative to understand the tasks, paperwork, and steps involved with each phase. The above diagram is an extremely zoomed-out view of the overall service phases our team of designers were given to start designing MVP versions. The service journey would span across the following phases:
Pre-Service - involving discovering Driveway, learning about the service offerings, and comparing to competitors
Inspection and Valuation - getting an online estimate on vehicle, booking an inspection appointment, completing an inspection, and receiving payment with a series of emails to support the customer journey
During Service - the core of Driveway.com, the process of browsing, filtering, shopping vehicles online, financing and checkout, and lastly payment
Post Service - supporting the entire customer lifecycle with vehicle servicing (oil changes, tire replacements) and initiating future trade/shop opportunities
Fieldmate (iPad App)
Used to support vehicle inspections
Used by Valets (dealership personnel)
Enabled managing inspection appointments
Resulted in a vehicle price that would be presented to the customer
Introducing Fieldmate
The first project I worked on for Driveway was called Fieldmate. Fieldmate is an iPad app used by valets to complete an in-person inspection of customer vehicles. The app mirrored the paper clipboards that would be carried around while checking each aspect of the vehicle. It’s a series of checklists and questions to answer about the vehicle and is connected to an API that helps give the valet insight into the price valuation of the vehicle.
As a customer, you’d be able to go online and get an online estimate on your vehicle, book an inspection appointment, and get paid as soon as the inspection was completed. Since this would often be the first step a customer would have when interacting with Driveway, it was essential to get the design right. I planned and completed two user test iterations for Fieldmate.
User testing focuses for Fieldmate:
ease in receiving an online estimate
process of setting an appointment
stage of an inspection
develop easily understandable terminology to be used to complete the inspection
iterate on navigation flows correspondent to real-life vehicle inspection pathways
stress environment and ergonomics of utilizing iPad throughout the inspection
understand the emotional journeys of valets and customers that support the inspection process
User Testing Themes
User Testing Summary
By completing a series of quick-paced guerrilla-style user tests, it became clear to product managers that Fieldmate in many ways worked, and in some ways the app needed improvements. Me and two other designers spent days shadowing valets, studying in-app and service improvements. The themes felt comprehensive, covering several areas for adjustment.
The most challenging aspect that we discovered in testing was how to instill transparency and trust of the final price breakdown.
To get away from the dealership method we had to show the customer exactly how that price was created.
This placed more pressure on the confirmation screens clearly stating the details that surfaced in valuation. Line item breakdowns like number of scrapes, or rim damage for example needed to be called out.
User testing results:
Inspection stepper design - to be used to switch back and forth between inspection steps
Training and scripts to be used by valets
Ability to add quantity to specific aspects of vehicle damage like scrapes
Redesign of confirmation screen and final step of inspection
Design of inspection appointment manager
Ability to create an inspection from new, giving valets ultimate flexibility in recording inspection results
Tool tip used to define and explain terms
Ideas about an inspection history feature to be used by valets to recap a week or month’s worth of inspections
Baierl.com aka Year, Make, Model, and Trim (YMMT)
After testing and iterating on Fieldmate, I switched focuses to Baierl.com — a white-labeled online experience for giving potential customers an online estimate on their vehicle. This website offered a simple task for customers to complete that would inform the inspection. The task was filling out a few screens of questions about the vehicle, the mileage, and known damage. It resulted in an online offer that customers could move forward with booking an appointment for an inspection.
Baierl.com offered us opportunities as we treated this touchpoint as our digital front door, a way for us to inform the relationship customers would have with the entire Driveway service. I conducted a quick testing plan to get design feedback on the website’s overall navigation, content, and UI. Trustworthiness amongst users became the most impactful learning of these tests. For example, how willing were customers to give out VIN on their vehicle, how the estimate was presented and how realistic was the number as some direct questions from participants throughout testing.
Another insightful research finding from testing was where in the flow the website asked customers for their contact information. Product owners pushed for contact info being asked in the first step of the valuation process (for lead generation purposes), as designers we pushed for contact collection to come right after the online estimate, as a way to book an appointment. This cycle of user tests illuminated to product owners why the timing of this step is so crucial.
Baierl.com also lended opportunity to study user intent. As the first introduction to the service, we wanted to engage customers towards the beginning of their experience with results. Receiving an online estimate ensured that a customer got value back when their intent was the highest it would be throughout the entire journey.
We wrapped on this project by making incremental changes to the flow, porting additional APIs to support the backend, and redesigning the landing experience as a way to increase conversion. The project was very successful and acted as a proof point for product owners, technologists and engineers to build off.
Success on projects prior led to more funding to keep going, keep building, continue visioning
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