Online Car Sales

The challenge

Audi had an existing e-commerce platform, ‘Buy My Audi’ designed for the sale of used vehicles. Presented with the user data and testing outputs around By My Audi, how could we create a new experience that would really encourage prospective Audi customers to buy their next vehicle online? And to add to the complexity, how could we stay true to Audi’s future vision of providing a world leading digital service experience?

More than a visual redesign

The need was not simply to design a better Buy My Audi. We aimed to create a new experience that would truly encourage buyers to shop online for their next Audi vehicle. 

This meant understanding the reasons they weren’t currently buying online, what their greatest consumer needs were and what would bring value in the buying process. 

Firstly however, why as a business was this task even worth undertaking?

The role

Over the next few months, I conducted the initial and ongoing user research that would allow for a successful end product, and as a Service Designer, broke this down into a backlog of definable and deliverable work, keeping us true to the business and customer goals along the way.

Working as the central connect between the client, our creative team and our own ways of working, I facilitated the sessions that would drive the main features of the end product, including persona building, journey mapping, ideation and prioritisation.

I created the outputs from these sessions that would go on to form the key features and subsequent components of the final product, and worked with our creative team and the product owner to bring these to fruition.

Initial Research

This was an oddly unique problem. Unlike the majority of consumer goods and services, vehicles have struggled to make the shift to an online sales model. 

This is by no means an unreported phenomenon, and so I set out to explore what ground had been made in our wake.

Why is vehicle e-commerce failing?

The research was broad and methods were relatively diverse, but almost all publications pointed to  a common theme of trust, the facilitators of which I broke down into six key themes:

User research

Our next step was conducting direct user research, with the following aims:

1. Discover who our primary audience is

2. Understand what is important to them in buying a car

3. Their expectations for a top tier online experience

We began with the research-driven premise that users would fall into the following categories:

…From here we conducted high level research:

Breaking down early insights

This initial user research not only provided some insight into the demographic of our key users, but crucially highlighted that customers may be willing to buy a car online if:

1. The price is competitive

2. The appropriate offering or incentive is present

3. The tactility of the offline experience can permeate to online

With this, we set out to further understand our users and the ideal journey for them, including the features that would matter most.

Understanding the user

As consumer expectations for a greater overall buying and ownership experience continue to increase, a critical look at the interaction with the end user was paramount. From our early researched, combined with Audi’s market intelligence, we derived the following user segments:

Ideation

To ideate effectively, we first had to reconvene to summarise the problem and the need, in order to move forward with a single understanding.

Defining the work - a time of setback

Ultimately, the optimal digital experience would not be a fully digital one. Research showed that though customers are willing to buy online under the right conditions, there is real value in grounding some parts of the journey in the physical realm.

However, business decisions made during the time of the project meant that there was limited scope to invest in new capabilities. Designing a new online platform is far less frictional than designing and implementing an entire experience, underpinned by new business processes. The next stages therefore, were to:

1. Define what the business was actually capable of/willing to do.

2. Determine plausibility vs cruciality of features.

3. Define the subsequent main features of an MVP, which would address our business goals.

Workshops

During this stage it became clear that, though as a unified team (both us and the client) our vision was to create an entirely new customer experience, necessary investment from key business stakeholders was limited.

The accepted solution, was to begin with the design of a fully online platform as our MVP, and explore the possibility of building a reinvented omnichannel experience on top of this.

From one of the most challenging and potentially compromising decisions of the project, came, at the very least, some direction. We had enough clarity to begin defining the work, and designing a subsequent prototype.

Doing the Business Analyst thing

Having to define an MVP meant identifying the key points of value prioritising them and making the outline visible and digestible to the key stakeholders. To accomplish this I did the following:

1. Itemised the “big ideas” from our research and ideation stages into a prioritised list, under the value themes we defined.

2. Combined these with the ‘value insights’ Audi had gained from its own primary user research and the list of feature ‘wants’ from the product owner, to create a definitive list of user stories.

3. Through some additional discovery work, expanded on the details, enablers and sizings of each story, and then placed them into subsequent epics.

4. Created a backlog in a digital productivity tool (Jira) and converted all our user stories into backlog items, then prioritised them according to business capabilities, user impact and design/tech feasibility (working with our lead architect to do the latter).

5. Converted the backlog back to the original and preferred format of the product owner, so they could share among business stakeholders.

The result was a clear vision of an initial MVP, a separate view of a wider long term vision, and a view of the business goals we were looking to address with a successful service.

Prototyping and Design

Having a newly founded view of the initial experience we wanted to create, the technical enablement needed and the business aims that would define success, I set out working with a visual and UX design team to create an initial set of prototypes.

End to end customer journey

What was the overall journey that would be meaningful for the customer?

Final designs

Working with an incredible design team we prototyped, tested, refined and produced the final MVP concept:

This concept brought to life many of the principles we envisioned in our user research and business modelling stages, including:

• Visualising the customer journey

• In-depth configuration

• Simplifying the finance option

• Allowing a transparent and configurable finance journey

• Allow the customer to pick up later

• Seamless online to dealer handoff

• Making the online experience interactive

The concept was taken forth for production but ultimately paused by the client, who picked up our initial discovery work and research later for future projects.