GoAuto: eCom Website Redesign

UX Strategy

Client

GoAuto

My Role

UX Designer and Product Manager

Time

6 months (2022)

About the Project

GoAuto, a car dealership in North America, wanted to redesign a suite of websites to incorporate a new branding strategy.

The Problem

The redesign was initially driven by branding, but the goal was to explore ways to improve the digital customer experiences and come up with innovative solutions.

Discovery Phase

We started this project with a discovery phase to understand the business and the customer needs. I was responsible for:

1. Stakeholder Interviews

Collecting insights, data and expectations from the internal leadership team to understand the business direction.

2. Customer interviews

Getting feedback from current customers about their recent purchase experience to understand needs and pain points.

3. Competitive analysis

Reviewing competitors to understand the market landscape, identify basic features and identify opportunities

4. Heuristic Evaluation

Analyzing GoAuto's existing website to get familiar with the content and identify key usability issues

Defintion Phase

Based on our collected insights we identified the key target audience, their needs and ideas for improvements

1. Personas

Based on my user interviews and on existing market research I created 3 primary personas.

2. User Stories

I identified the key tasks and steps for each persona in form of a user story. In a workshop we ideated feature ideas based on the stories.

3. User Flow

We defined a set of key tasks and I created a detailed user flow to map our feature list.

4. Sitemap

I redefined the information architecture for the website based on our new vision

Design Phase

With our ideal vision in mind we created a roadmap and organized the design phase in agile sprints. I was responsible for:

1. Requirements definition

Defining requirements for our feature list

2. Sprint planning

Organizing our design approach in form of templates, components and split it into sprints

3. Wireframes

Create an interactive prototype, annotate wireframes and cerate reusable content components for our design library

4. Usability Test

Get user feedback based on an interactive prototype

Challenges & Restrictions

The biggest challenge was to manage expectations and move from an “ideal and visionary dream state” to a “feasible and realistic design scope”. With the support of a lot of creative minds, we had a massive wishlist of features that we needed to fit into a specific budget and timeline. We uncovered a lot of detailed complexity throughout the design process and had to make tough decisions to keep the project in scope without loosing the main objective out of sight.

Outcomes & Learnings

In this project, I got to dive deeper into project management and product management. I was responsible for creating a bigger vision and planning it into manageable tasks, detailed features and design elements. We should have been more radical in prioritizing and reducing feature ideas to keep the initial scope, but we did grow as a team and ended with a successful result.