Case Study: On The Lot
The Case Study for version 2 of “On The Lot”, which is where most of the work was done, is at this password protected link.
Version 1.0 MVP
Phase one for “On The Lot” (OTL) was initially envisioned to be a quick win “MVP”. From ideation to the completing User Stories for the development team was to take only a few weeks. The Product Owner at the time wanted to focus on early stage shoppers who were more inclined to browse than purchase immediately.
A broader goal for the business was to promote OTL as a unique experience, for users who had activated location services on their mobile devices. This would also help distinguish our business in a field that was only getting more competitive.
Because a location-based product was new territory for us (and, frankly, for most car shoppers), I wanted the design to leverage consumers’ familiarity with popular location-based apps such as Uber or Lyft in order to maximize adoption.
Presented in this case study are the iOS designs, but the project was cross-platform.
Home screen with dealer location detected. Coordinating this work effort with the other UX and tech leads was an agenda item once the map approach was decided upon.
At the time version 1 was being worked on, we did not have a robust push notification system in place. So the most logical way to draw a dotted line from other location-based experiences was to passively present a map interface on the home screen. The map was also helpful from a usability perspective since dealerships are often clustered together by location in the real world, and auto-locating within a .10 mile radius could be imprecise.
Due to the short timeframe for version 1, it was necessary to leverage as much existing app content as possible. This meant focusing on our core business (car listings), and applying as much hyper-local filtering as was available at the time. The “express lane” concept was simply a way to reduce the amount of steps the user would have to take to get to the content they wanted to see most; stuff that was normally buried deep within the user interface.
This carousel on the Home Screen was designed to be the most minimum “MVP”, if development of the map interface was determined by the developers to be unrealistic within the allotted time frame. Tapping on a vehicle in the carousel skips directly to “More Like This”. The “See All Inventory” link or the dealer pop-up in the map version would take the user to a localized version of the dealer’s inventory screen.
One possible enhancement to version 1 of OTL was to reduce the number of steps a user would have to take to compare similar cars. This tutorial layer illustrated one possible way to streamline that UI. By taking users to the “More Like this” screen, we tried to satisfy early-stage shoppers with the quickest browsing experience possible.
The designs for version 1 of OTL were completed, then the Product Owner announced he was going on sabbatical. The new Product Owner who would fulfill the role while he was gone had a different, bigger vision for the product, so it was decided to start again from scratch.
On The Lot v2…
But wait, there’s more! Version 2 of “On The Lot” was a much more in-depth project, involving a Design Studio session with the Mobile Apps team, 2 rounds of User Testing, and a full exploration of the UX flow.
Because of the competitive nature of OTL, I didn’t want to publish the work in full view of the public. To view the full Case Study for On The Lot version 2, use the password provided and click here.