Brief

Have you ever been approached and asked, “Hey can you do your design thing and make this better?”. Well that was the way we were approached by the dealership council regarding their Inventory Detail page in the dealership website. The following is a documentation of how I went about investigating the problem with the clients, understanding platform restrictions through the development team, and coming up with a systematic solution which was pitched to GM Business and the South American Dealership Counsel.

You'll notice that the missing persona is "the customer". Unfortunately the client doesn't put a significant emphasis on customers, and rightfully so. A dealership website is not a true e-commerce experience as there is no point of purchase. The website is better characterized as a lead generator, and in the eyes of the client, its working fine. 

The design opportunity here is that the UX team has the freedom to inject as many best-practices as possible for the end user.

Asking the question

On the surface, this request sounds like a simple re-design effort. The PD page DID look dated, as did the rest of the website. Our visual designers were ready to knock it out of the park, but I wasn’t convinced that the problem was that simple. The objective was to gain insight of nuance. I wanted to collect start collecting expressed pain-points, compare them with how people actually behave throughout performing their tasks, and categorize them into different buckets.

I was able to get some time from council members who had aggregated the comments from dealership owners. After a long and casual conversation, I had boiled down the declared and revealed preferences into the following:

• There is a desire on the part of the dealerships to have their websites look in-line with OEM websites

• Dealerships want to be able to distinguish themselves

• Dealerships actually want multiple templates to choose from since the content volume between vehicle models are different

• Dealerships across borders want different templates since model availability can vary amongst countries

• Dealerships don’t actually want to do the work of manual content entry, so they outsource it to the AOR (discovered new user)

The data entry work being outsourced was news to me, so naturally I reached out to them to conduct some interviews. Their concerns revolved around the CMS:

• The CMS is rigid and does not allow for diversity in layout

• The CMS is very difficult to navigate through, as the content entry wells and its corresponding labels are not good indicators of what its meant to do

• The content/asset collection exercise is very difficult

• The request for publishing these PD pages come through text messages (sometimes email)

• There’s no simple or standardized way to log and track errors (no communication channel)

From a design perspective, there was plenty of issues that needed to be addressed:

• Marketing content was baked into the hero image (no scaling, accessibility, translating, or SEO)

• The PD content has no hierarchy

• The design looks dated

• The check-out journey is clear but not prominent

• The design is not optimized for responsive

• There is an opportunity for the design to come closer inline with Chevrolet style

The development team also faces a common challenge. They simply lack the resources to change their platform & DB structures on a whim. They have limitations, and because of this, they are always blamed for everything.

Making sense of all the feedback

With many perspectives I had gathered, I started to envision a systematic solution where the Admin tool was at the core that would resolve design, communication, and regional content management issues. On the surface, these problems may not seem related to each other, and they are most definitely not related to the PD re-design. As I said before, my objective is to discover unrealized potential. I saw a chance to bring joy to everyone involved in the project.

I obsess over the moral of people involved in developing a product. No matter how well we fulfill our roles independently, a product created by a team without synergy is rarely good for a customer. With enough patience, there always seems to be an essence that a person is asking for. Finding that essence is the first time 2 parties can start a negotiation. 

Now I just have to create a solution that addresses the essence of everyone’s collective requests.

Pick a starting point

I sat with our visual designer and started to outline some design requirements on a high level. My requirements boiled down to the following:

• A hero carousel layout that separated text from an image

• Reference typography, color, and spacing from the brand website

• Create a design sample for different kinds of content (Just text, text with image, etc)

• Different options to keep the lead form CTA on the page at all times

My tactical intentions were to separate the PD page body content into sections that could be turned on/off or edited independently of other PD pages.

Rallying the team

With the design requirements in hand, I started my wireframes and requirements along with the development team. As I pitched the vision of this initiative, the dev team took notes, wrote their own stories, and added comments where they thought improvements could be made. I had boiled down my intended changes to the Admin tool to the following:

• Better IA and labeling (Based on informal focus group with users)

• A clearly defined workflow

• An infrastructure that enables future improvement (communication management)

• A way to pull information from external sources

• A way to push information to external systems

The result was a proposal for an admin tool that was able to generate an un-templatized PD page that could theoretically be used for all other pages in the Dealership website. I had created mock-ups, clickable prototypes, and documentation to illustrate the magnitude of what was being proposed.

Though this may still seem like a design solution, but I’m also very cognizant of how the team communicates. An opportunity I wanted to explore was to use the very tool we are building as the central communication hub for all of our stake holders. The team had collectively decided to tackle the communications in a separate effort, but I had laid out the basic flow for what that may look like based on interviewing the business, development, and agency users.

Questions I ask of myself

My starting point to any request is to always ask myself “What is the lifespan of what I’m being asked to build? What are the unrealized values and what are the potentials for posterity if I do this right?” Not every request scales from a re-design to a change in how a team operates, but when the opportunity presents itself, I feel the effort of going above and beyond is most definitely worth it.