Frederic Berghmans
Company: CAR FOR YOU
Role: Product Designer
Duration: 4 Months (June 2020 - Sept 2020 )
CAR FOR YOU is a car dealerhsip marketplace (Startup)
Part of TX Markets. 50 employees
Given the restrictions of COVID-19 we needed to identify additional revenue streams and a sustainable business model while creating value for both buyers and dealerships.
2 Project managers, 2 UX Researchers and 1 UX Designer
The existing business model for CAR FOR YOU relies on a combination of ads and yearly membership fees for dealerships. This income stream is insufficient.
CAR FOR YOU’s platform connects buyers with the car dealerships. It however doesn’t allow us to understand the content of their conversation.
Increase revenue, exact numbers need to remain confidential.
If we can release an MVP to track online and offline sales on our platform, we can increase revenue by asking a percentage fee for every car sold.
Starting from the desire and the market fit, we needed to understand how we could create value for both the buyers and the car dealers.
To prepare you for the process we used the design thinking methodology.
Qualitative 20 min interviews performed by UX researchers but important for this case study:
Interviewed 9 people to understand the problems on both buyer (4) and dealership side (5).
Talking to the critical user groups will reveal the process, pain points and highlights of their current experience when buying/selling cars.
Because of time and resource constraints, we brainstormed ideas in advance as we couldn’t interview more users to be statistically more accurate. What we believed to be painpoints and their JTBD, we later had validated by the actual users (after the workshop, see next part) for both journeys within the car buying/selling industry.
What can we learn?
fig: Buyer journey summary
> Check out an in depth overview of the buyer journey
fig: Buyer journey (+ opportunities) validated with users
> Check out an in depth overview of the seller journey
fig: Seller journey + opportunities - findings in red are not validated yet with users
In parallel to validating with users we wanted to get feedback from more people from the company.
The goal of the workshop was to showcase the user journey to stakeholders and collect their inputs and ideas on how we can shape the transactional model by creating value for the user (buyer and dealership).
fig: Images from the workshop - 8 Different roles of the company incl CPO and CEO
fig: Due to budget constraints we could only host a one day workshop
(usually a normal design sprint takes 5 days, take a look at how I did this)
Taking the concepts from the workshop and additional ideas, we tested 6 wireframe concepts with 8 buyers and 6 dealerships. The following 2 performed best:
As a buyer, I can enter a desired date for a test drive directly, which must then be confirmed by the garage owner within 24h.
"Booking a testdrive is very far down the funnel of buying a car, hence we could send out an automatic email asking if the buyer purchased the car a week after the testdrive."
To validate this we’ve send out a test email to all buyers that reached out to dealers about a car and we had quite a high response rate (32%).
fig: Booking a testdrive concept
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As a buyer, you can start the purchase process of a car straight on our platform. This process is legally binding.
fig: “Im interested” in the first screen (product detail page) will guide you through a process
Next, You are shown an overview of options...
A reservation on the car is guaranteed to the buyer.
This was well perceived but accepting payments would be difficult to implement on the platform.
In real life however we couldn’t guarantee that the car would still be still available for purchase + holding a payment for that makes you liable.
An alternative concept...
Start the purchase process, without paying a fee.
This was very well perceived if the buyer will receive additional advantages which he wouldn’t receive at the dealership.
Eg.: Warranty and moneyback guarantee after 7 days or 500km
We did extensive user testing for both buying a car online and the testdrive feature with both 8 buyers and 6 dealerships. Each with respected prototypes.
Below you can find the buyer side, for the sake of this case study I left out the dealership side.
Rapid Prototyping was done in figma, we used the RITE method where we design, test and iterate every next day. Feedback was given by the researchers right in figma.
fig: Comments given in Figma
Uploading a drivers licence matching the user entered details means less work for the dealership and increased likeliness that the buyer is willing to purchase.
An email is sent a week after the testdrive to ask the prospect if he/she purchased the car.
handhold the user into seperate steps to book their testdrive
Overview of what to expect during a testdrive, read contextually more about it
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We repeat the same handholding before you purchase the car. We take the car offline when it's sold
Our data shows that 90% of users are mostly interested in the image carousel. Hence we use the last image from the carousel to inform the user even more and upsell the online purchase
Convey trust (rating and more info is contextually available to the buyer)
Landingpage with information and handholding. Prepare the user for what’s coming, buying a car is scary
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In parallel with the last user test we let an external agency conduct a competitor anaylsis.
Cazoo, a UK based company is currently doing the transactional business model we are striving to do in the future.
The only difference is that they hold the inventory so they are more flexible in the deals they can make with their buyers.
The live result can be found here, this landingpage is also build by myself in Webflow to lower the burden on the development team.
https://www.carforyou.ch/en/content/online-purchaseAfter the first month we could start to see the results...
online car sales in the first month of MVP*
Dealerships activated online purchases
Cars available for purchase on the platform
The goal was 4*
Because CAR FOR YOU is still such a young company, it didn’t have a proper validated user journey for the dealership just yet. This meant we had to prepare as much of this as possible within a tight timeline and restricted budget.
At the start of the project, the core team had several discussions in regard to the next steps. We would have eliminated these discussions by getting feedback from the users if we would have shipped or prototyped sooner.
Accepting payments would be something that would have taken us a couple of sprints to build because of the technical limitations of the platform. We learned to have a weekly sync with a few key people in the company so we can align in the highest priorities regarding the business model while bouncing off ideas.