PERIOD
May 2021-Nov 2021
cLIENT
The Company
Carlotz is a company that specializes in selling used cars through consignment. Their goal is to provide a hassle-free car buying and selling experience for customers. With 8 retail hubs across 50 states and over 25,000 vehicles sold, during the time of this project they were a rising star in the used car market in competition with companies such a Shift, Vroom and Carvana. In late 2022, Carlotz was acquired by Shift for $750 million.
The Problem
With online used-car sales at an all-time high, Carlotz, a traditionally brick-and-mortar company, identified the opportunity to enter the online-market. After raising $300 million in funding, Carlotz turned to our team to help strategically design, build and launch a competitive sales platform for their used car inventory.
My Role
As one of five hands-on designers, I contributed to the compressive branding, design, and implementation of Carlotz's new web presence. Working primarily with the web design team, my responsibilities included overseeing third-party integrations and building, designing, and implementing a design system that was used throughout the site. Later in the project, I facilitated a user research study using the Kano Method which tested the desirability of future features.
I joined the Cartlotz project during a time when delivery was in full swing. However, ongoing research was still necessary to design and develop specific features, as well as ideate and test new features with users. To build quickly and agilely, my team used the following methods to gain a deep understanding of the space and orient ourselves strategically.
User Interviews
Our team spent time talking with users in about their car buying experience and gleaning key insights that would help us design a platform that was conducive to buying a car in 2021.
Competitive Analysis
By analyzing the features that top competitors offered on their platforms, we were able to identify key features that we needed to include, as well as test existing patterns.
Current customer journey mapping
By mapping users journey the car buying experience, we were able to pinpoint key features that would improve the experience. Our analysis allowed us to pinpoint specific areas, such as financing, where improvements could be made.
Provisional Persona Creation
By identifying persona “groups” our team was able to help Carlotz better empathize with their customers. This excises additionally helped us implement a novel filtering options tailored specifically for these personas.
Road-mapping
With tight timelines and pressure from investors, keeping an updated road-map was key to continued collaboration with our client. This was an ongoing excises throughout the engagement which was facilitated by the experience design team.
Current site-map documentation
We conducted an audit of the current site to evaluate functionality, performance, security, and user experience issues.
Backlog creation
Working tightly with our product mangers and product owners, the design team helped write and maintain an extensive backlog of epics, stories and spikes in Azure DevOps.
The Kano Model
Using the The Kano Model, our team ran a research initiative aimed at not only identifying the basic needs of customers, but also testing new and exciting features that would increase customer satisfaction. This model is based on the view that functionality is not the only measure of how ‘good’ a product. Customer emotions should also be taken into account. Due to the extensive nature of this research, I have written another case study outlining the study here.
'Yesterdays' Carlotz
Redesigned Platform
Like any large-scale project, we faced significant challenges. From setting up a functional backlog to corralling our client into providing copy and content, this was no easy feat, and tensions were often high. In particular, Carlotz had difficulties establishing branding, and there were multiple visual direction changes. The resulting site and design strikes the balance between what was possible given our time constraints and budget, and our teams creative vision.
To better organize our team, we developed a design governance plan that includes sprint-by-sprint development-ready files, tracking of future features and ideation, and documentation on topics such as story writing and system navigation for new team members.
Following best practices, we built a fully componentized, auto-layout, and responsive design system. This system exists in both Figma, as a design resource, and in Storybook, for reusable developed components. This approach allowed the design and development teams to quickly scale and allowed for unique and original designs with customizations such as an interactive search bar, custom filtering, and cards that incorporated micro-interactions.
End results
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