App Cert Enhancements
Redesigning the App Cert experience on DriveTime.com so a customer can see their personalized terms on every car.
DriveTime
Project Overview
Role
UX/UI Design
Team
1 manager, 1 product analyst, 1 UX designer, 1 content specialist, 1 graphic designer
Tools
Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Miro, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zeplin
Challenge
The Approval Certificate (App Cert) page is not consistent with the direction the Vehicle Search Results (VSR) page has taken, which is to display terms on every vehicle. This has created a gap in the customer’s online shopping experience.
Solution
Redesign above the fold of the App Cert page to display a selection of cars with the user’s personalized terms.
Before
After
Project Background
When I had first joined the DriveTime creative team, a big change had been made to the company’s website: Adding terms to the Vehicle Search Results (VSR) page. This gave users a way to see their personalized terms on every vehicle they browse. This was called the “HyperDrive” experience, and brought us one step closer to giving users the ability to shop and purchase a vehicle online.
Prior to shopping vehicles with their personalized terms, the user must complete our Get Approved (GA) forms. If successful, they land on our Approval Certificate (App Cert) page where they are then prompted with their starting terms, which are pulled from the cheapest vehicle available to them. At the time, these terms were displayed simply as numbers with no car attached.
App Cert Enhancements was a feature handoff that was assigned to me. The ask was to reimagine what the App Cert experience could look like so that it is both visually up to speed with our current design system and plays off of the experience HyperDrive customers are receiving on VSR. The goal in doing this was to encourage more customers to continue shopping cars online, leading to an increase in lead to app.
Results
About eight months into this experiment running, we turned off Control so that there was now 50/50 traffic to either List or Carousel. This was so we could gather more metrics to compare the two against one another without Control bucketing interfering with that data.
Adding a “Shop Cars” button
In order to access the button in the original view of Carousel, you’d need to rely on a user swiping through the entire carousel and tapping on the last card, while in List it is always in view. Since List and Carousel had similar downstream results, we wanted to give Carousel a fair chance by making the “Shop Cars” CTA just as easily accessible as it was in the List view.
These were the results of the new Carousel experience:
The business decision was that Carousel was the better experience and was officially declared the winner. 🎉
What I Learned
Mobile-first design can be really efficient. A desktop-first approach was what I was more familiar with at the time, so having to go about this the other way around gave me an opportunity to approach my work a little differently (less to more as opposed to more to less).
Small changes can have a big impact. This project taught me the value of being able to hyper-focus on a very specific thing rather than the page as a whole. Even though I wasn’t redesigning the entire page or website, it taught me how important just a small section can play in the UX and post-launch results of a product.
Take necessary breaks when your initial ideas aren’t working. Sometimes I have difficulty with stepping away when experiencing those moments of frustration or doubt, but with this project I had to. Getting a good night’s rest and coming back to it the next day gave me a fresh perspective, and eventually I was able to create something that stuck.
One mind can produce something good, but collaboration creates something great. This was one of the most collaborative projects I had been a part of in this season of my design career. It took brainstorming and sharing my in-progress work with my boss and colleagues to not get too stuck on one idea, getting together with our content specialist to find just the right copy, and working with our graphic designer to create an illustration that fit the vision. You can still take ownership of your work while picking the brains of others, and it’s a great reminder to not let one’s own ego hold you back.