AutoTrader.ca
Designing an omnichannel instant car sales experience for users.
Omnichannel car sales
The Instant Cash Offer product benefits both consumers and dealers. It provides a faster and easier way for consumers to sell or trade-in their vehicle. It also provides qualified and ready-to-go sales leads for dealers.
The product connects buyers and sellers online and supports an effective on-the-lot retail negotiation process.
From small pilot to flagship success
Taking the product from a small pilot to one of the flagship new products of 2019, supported by a TV advertising campaign.
The agile team worked alongside the rest of the business to optimize product conversion and ready the product for prime-time.
User research and testing
Understanding the user needs iteratively at each stage of the project is critically important to launch a successful product. For this project, users were consumers, (normal people who were interested in selling/valuing their car) as well as dealerships.
UserTesting.com was used because of it’s availability in the business and the the ease of use to quickly test online with numerous users matching a specific criteria. The downside with Usertesting.com is that many of the testers are professional ‘paid’ testers.
Preference would be to perform more Guerilla based and in-person usability testing.
Visiting the dealer onsite was valuable to understand dealers needs and their off-line processes.
Other inputs included Marketing insights from Survey monkey, and other forms of user insight.
A large amount of data analysis of quantitative analytics data (including A/B/multi-variant testing strategies) was also used.
The needs of normal people selling their cars and dealers often varied. The user research allowed us to understand both forms of users and optimize the online and offline funnel to help address the needs of both users.
Information Architecture and User Journeys
A new product does not sit in isolation, especially on a highly trafficked website such as Autotrader.ca.
Extensive work was carried out to capture and optimize the user journeys across the entire real estate of:
- Responsive website across desktop, mobile and tablet.
- Android
- iOS
Because of the limitations of the development team and agile sprints, multiple journey designs were created, each allowing for a greater level of integration and possibility for testing.
Omnichannel product
Product was built across desktop web, mobile web, Android and iOS in both English and French.
As users progressed through the conversion funnel, a core part of the product was the interaction with dealers. (e.g. calling and visiting a dealer).
Customers perceptions and behaviors were observed as customers progressed back and forth between online and offline channels.
This allowed with tweaking the experience at different stages of the omnichannel funnel to allow for optimized conversion.
Balancing conversion
The product conversion funnel has multiple stages of conversion as the user progresses through the journey.
Starting off with the initial marketing conversion, the aim was to get users onto the landing page from various online and offline advertising, including word of mouth.
The next step was to get users into the funnel from the landing page. By altering experience on the landing page, we could convert more users into the funnel. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because if the users were not educated well beforehand, they may drop out during the process.
The quality of users entering the funnel from the landing page, would ultimately determine whether low or high quality leads were sent to the dealer.
Individual dealers would have their own preference on whether they wanted to receive many low quality leads, or just a few high quality leads.
The low quality leads could convert to foot, but not necessarily cars being traded in. The high quality leads would generally convert to trade-in’s at a higher rate.
Conversion rate optimization
A number of changes were made to improve the quality of leads within the online funnel process.
One example of this was to add Twilio SMS / Phone code validation that would send a code to the users phone.
This would help to improve the quality of leads, ensuring that users were in possession of the phone and that the dealer could reach the seller of the car using valid contact details.
Adding prominent messaging and other improvements (some of which cannot be disclosed here) were also carried out with the aim of improving conversion.
Help and Support
Although the actual flow is very simple, users have many surrounding questions about the experience. A FAQ area and other initiatives were set up to help improve online conversion and increase the quality of leads before the user visited the dealer.
I am a firm believer that good design should not need instructions of any kind. Instructions are often needed to prop up a bad design. In this case I was forced to work within an existing design and ecosystem, hence the need to extra instructions to the user.
Error scenarios and improved UI consistency
Because of the complexity of the underlying logic, extensive effort was invested, working with developers to develop the edge cases and error scenarios.
Global style guide was also updated to bring UI up to a best practice standard. The changes made to the UI style guide could reduce the need for unnecessary design differentiation between Android, iOS and web ongoing.
Certificate & Email Redesign
Significant time was investing in redesigning the quote certificates and emails. This was a critical step between the online world and offline when the user decided to visit the dealer on the lot.
If at this stage, if users found the quote to be too low, they may drop out entirely from the end-to-end flow.
Various initiatives were put into place on both the users side and the dealers side, to encourage the users to visit the dealer. These included both UX and UI changes within the certificate, along with extra training at the dealership.
Android & iOS app specific functionality
The entire online product was also developed for and launched on the Android and iOS apps as well as responsive web.
This allowed for the users of these popular apps to benefit from the Instant Cash Offer product.
Considerations for native UI styling, behaviours and functionality all needed to be considered and designed.
About AutoTrader.ca
TRADER Corporation is a leading digital player in Canadian automotive with marketplaces autoTRADER.ca and autoHEBDO.net. these which cumulatively generate 17.7 million visits each month. In addition to the public marketplaces, Trader also a powerful suite of solutions FOR DEALERS – leading Marketplaces, Web Solutions, Web Traffic, Inventory Management, Conversion Tools, and industry-leading customer service to help improve business performance of dealers across Canada.
Steve Kuchka
Director - Marketplace Delivery
Stephen and I worked on a number of ecommerce and marketplace initiatives at autotrader.ca. Stephen is a passionate UX expert who integrates seamlessly with development and product teams. He is an extremely effective communicator at helping multi-discipline stakeholders understand and align with the core values & visual language of UX. He sets high standards without being an isolationist diva sitting in a UX ivory tower. Highly adaptable to complex strategic roadmaps, Stephen gets concepts quickly and is a rare animal that not only can grasp and define the high level strategy, but also is willing to personally churn out the assets to deliver on that strategy quickly. Any digital business would find Stephen to be a highly worthwhile hire.
Leo Berlin
Senior UX / UI Designer
Stephen is a talented Product Designer who brings an enormous amount of experience and knowledge of both B2C and B2B design executions. He strives for consistency and usability on every stage of product development. He has a true passion for what he does and an outstanding eye for detail. It was a pleasure to work with him at autoTRADER.ca with his ‘whatever it takes’ attitude and vast experience, Stephen would make an instant impact anywhere he is.
Melanie Ringler
Delivery Lead
Stephen is an excellent leader in user experience and design.
We worked together for almost a year. He was temporarily filling in for the User Experience manager role at the company I was working for. As Delivery Lead on the e-commerce teams, Stephen and I worked closely together on a daily basis.
Stephen is a great strategist. He endeavors to really understand an organization’s business. He is a firm believer in design influencing product strategy at the beginning of the project and not as an afterthought, at the end of the execution stage. He is capable of handling multiple projects at once. He was able to handle chaotic times and pressure with calm and grace. I found Stephen very approachable. If I needed to discuss approaches or ideas, Stephen was always available to listen and share his thoughts. Because of his vast experience in the field, he always had important bits of wisdom to share.
Stephen also has mad hands-on skills. He is strong as a leader and he can still do the practical work with true expertise. I highly recommend Stephen and would consider myself very lucky to be able to work with him again.
Danilo Meireles
Senior Software Engineer
Stephen is an expert Product/UX Designer with an impressive background, excellent communication skills, and passionate about user experience. I had a pleasure to work with him for over a year in the same team at autotrader.ca and during that time I could learn a lot about the impact of the UX on any digital business. Stephen is very proactive, energic and his innovative ideas, strategies and proposed solutions, add a lot of value to the products. Stephen is also a great lead and a friend that is always helping and motivating all the people around him. I’m very grateful for the opportunity I had to work with Stephen.