Client
Lithia Motors is one of the largest providers of personal transportation solutions in the U.S. and is among the fastest-growing companies in the Fortune 500 (#158 in 2022). In 2020, they launched an e-commerce platform called “Driveway” to give car buyers and sellers a safe alternative to in-person car buying and selling in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Situation
When the MVP e-commerce platform launched in October 2020, it was bare-bones, to say the least. The website had a very basic search results page with limited filtering functionality and the checkout experience could only allow you to reserve a vehicle. The customer would have to wait to be contacted by a sales representative to complete the transaction over the phone.
Checkout 2.0 was the internal name for our initiative to update the Checkout experience to accommodate for variety of payment paths, vehicle & customer discounts, and other features that would increase customer confidence and get them to the point of purchase.
My role
product design manager
Partnered with Design, Content, Product Management, and Engineering to interpret strategic product vision into actionable design direction. Identified, scoped, and prioritized work and assigned work for 8-10 Designers. Oversaw project assignments and day-to-day activities with a sense of urgency; ensuring timely delivery while maintaining quality and documenting progress.
Paired closely with Product and Content Designers in Figma to provide design direction and constructive feedback ensuring a high level of design craft and quality. Supported designers in articulating design decisions, and helped them practice executive communication skills for design reviews and critiques.
DESIGN TEAM
Derek Shirk, June Walitzer, Tyler Varnu, Melissa Vu, Addison Kavish
Tasks
Optomize for price transparency
2. Design a dynamic Checkout navigation to accommodate a variety of customer situations and drive them to complete transactions.
Process
Target Personas
Our UX researchER compiled these target personas after completing 15-20 interviews with potential customers prior to the site launch. Our primary persona emerged POST LAUNCH WHEN WE WERE ABLE TO GATHER MORE SPECIFIC DATA ABOUT OUR SHOPPERS.
Auto Upgraders
A good portion of buyers think about their car in a similar way to their cell phone. They want the latest technology in the palm of their hand in their driveway. And while one might expect this type of person to lease, that’s not always the case. However, those individuals who choose to lease often feel this need the strongest and are more often thinking about cars in the periphery of their minds.
Homebodies
Several Driveway customers voluntarily describe themselves as homebodies. This is not the same as being introverted, though they may also self-identify as introverted. These people found the pandemic relatively easy to navigate because they prefer to spend their time at home. They can be very social, albeit among their tight-knit group of family and friends, or they may spend a fair amount of time watching television. Either way, their home is their castle and they don’t like to leave it it’s all avoidable.
Passenger Seat Buyers
Some Driveway customers are not experienced car buyers. A husband, father, or boyfriend may have taken on this role in the past. Others recently graduated and were ready to buy a car to set out on adult life or moved from a city where most people do not own cars, but have moved or otherwise decided that owning a car was necessary in a post-pandemic world. None of the people who fit this persona like the idea of negotiating.
credit improvers - PRIMARY PERSONA
These buyers are cost-conscious and credit-sensitive. They have experienced some financial hardships in the past that have prevented them from obtaining financing. Many fear the judgment and rejection they might face from salespeople in a brick-and-mortar dealership when their credit report is run. These buyers desperately want to start rebuilding their credit and prefer the ability to shop multiple options online.
Customer Flows
The Before
Throughout time, it became apparent that most customers dropped out of the Checkout flow on the Payment Options screen.
Research Inputs
Feedback from Driveway Customer Care Center and Driveway Finance Center
Interviews with potential and current customers
Power BI Custom dashboards combine sales data and provide insight into customer drop-off rates throughout the funnel
Research Outcomes
checkout learnings
checkout was kicking customers out
If a customer didn’t make the “happy path” selections they were often greeted with an angry modal telling them to call customer service. At the time, the business preferred to steer customers to customer service agents because there was a higher probability that agents could upsell customers or find a non-Driveway lender that would fund the deal. However, customers rarely called. It was typically the agents who called the customer. This is because the customer service agent gets emailed a lead every time a customer get’s past the Your Details page.
“😔 Call customer service for assistance? This process is too hard!
Let me try Carvana instead.”
“😫 Oh, well. That was a waste of time! ”
The payment step was the most problematic
We anticipated that the Payment step would have the highest dropoff but we didn’t do anything to address why users were dropping out at this point.
“🤔 But, wait! Can I really afford this? I don’t want go fill out a credit application if I’ll likely get denied.”
checkout in five easy steps
Five was the magic number, according to our executive team. It conveyed simplicity and it also matched the same number of steps as our key competitors. Yet, as the platform continued to expand, checkout had to expand to accommodate the ever-growing options customers were presented during their shopping experience. In preparation for adding New Vehicles to the inventory, we needed to add a third payment option to Checkout - lease.
“🙂 I like that it’s five steps. It seems easy enough to me. ”
Final Designs Features
We made iterative enhancements to the search experience so that by Q2 of 2022, we exceeded company transaction targets by 27%. We went from selling a handful of cars in the first few months of our initial launch to selling thousands of cars per month.
How we increased conversion rates through Checkout enhancements
increased customer confidence in their credit prior to checkout with upfront estimator
We addressed the fears of credit rejection head-on by creating a Pre-checkout step that we referred to as “Upfront Estimator” or “Cart Flow.” The goal of the estimator was to help the customer find the best possible path to getting approved. There are many factors that impact whether an individual can get approved for a car loan. In addition to credit history, the individual could be eligible to receive a status-based discount (i.e. student or veteran), vehicle-based discount (i.e. manufacturer discounts), the value of the vehicle, and whether they want to lease or finance. Believe it or not, sometimes individuals with improving credit will get turned down when trying to finance a Used vehicle but will be approved if they finance a New vehicle. The estimator is like a virtual agent helping potential customers navigate options and find the best deal for them. Some times a better deal is selecting a different vehicle.
Pre-Checkout Upfront Estimator on the Vehicle Description Page below with Likelihood Score
dynamic navigation can flex to handle a variety of checkout needs
One of our biggest challenges was to absorb the complexity of all the various options presented to customers during the shopping experience but make the Checkout experience as simple-looking as possible so customers would be encouraged to complete it from the start.
So we took apart the original stepper and factored in all the additional steps. Next, we prioritized the primary steps and grouped the relevant sub-steps beneath them.
We explored an alternative concept of a radial stepper that would display as a percentage complete. However, we abandoned that idea because it was extremely difficult to accurately reflect how “done” the customer was at any given point because we didn’t know what selections they would make until they made them.
The final result was this flexible five-step process that conceals complexity as customers move through each step.
Order Summary acts like a Dynamic receipt
We often heard frustrations from customers that they didn’t understand how their selections throughout the checkout process impacted the price of the vehicle. They wanted more transparency into what factors were driving the price.
As a result, we introduced our order summary at the very beginning of the checkout flow (instead of the end) so it was visible the entire time and customers could see the immediate impact of their selections on the price. We also provided a more detailed breakdown of items like incentives and discounts so customers that customers understood they were getting the best deal possible on their vehicle.
Team Obstacles
Friction points I successfully managed throughout the project
Problem
Lack of team process, poor communication
When I joined the team, I noticed that there wasn’t a defined process for the team. As a result, designers struggled to get regular input from Product and Engineering. In return, Product and Engineering complained that they lacked visibility of what the designers were working on. The problem was made even worse by the fact that designers used Favro to track their design work and the rest of the product development teams used Microsoft Azure. There wasn’t equal access across both tools.
my solution
Implemented design planning to create cross-functional alignment
I facilitated weekly cross-functional design planning and invited Product & Engineering so everyone had visibility to what design was working on and which designer was working on what. In this meeting, I collaborated with Product and Design to prioritize, scope, and assign the design work. I always opened the meeting by giving Product & Engineering the floor to share any immediate updates, questions, and concerns with the design team. Engineering helped Design identify feasibility constraints. Collectively we all set deadlines for design review, which is the ceremony we used to get approval from executive leadership before moving designs into development. I made sure Product and Engineering leads had full access to Favro so they could see the status of a design ticket at any time.
Problem
Scope creep from executive leadership
Throughout the project, we received many significant strategic shifts from executive leadership. When these changes were communicated to me, leadership would often demand that the design team pivot strategy but keep the original timeline. As a result, the design team felt like the goalpost was constantly moving but they had less and less time to reach it.
MY SOLUTion
Implement design estimation and negotiate tradeoffs with leadership
I knew that one way to build empathy for the design team was to help leadership and our cross-functional peers understand the amount of effort that goes into designing solutions. So I paired with my Lead Designer and our Lead PM to align on a design estimation process that we introduced into our weekly planning ceremony. We created a framework for design estimation and included that along with the scope of the design task on every design planning ticket. That way, when a significant change came down from leadership I’d be able to effectively communicate the “cost” of that change and the amount of time or resources needed to effectively complete it. This led to a much richer dialogue with stakeholders and enabled us to negotiate for extended deadlines or extra design resources to help us get it down in record time.