Car-Buying App
NETSOL’s Car-Buying app is an end-to-end car buying platform, and is a part of NETSOL’s suite of automotive products available on Appex Now. Dealerships and OEMs that subscribe to our product can customize and configure it according to their requirements and use it to sell vehicles to the end-user, completely online. Our app makes the car-buying process much easier, providing streamlined navigation and decreasing the sense of confusion among first-time buyers.
I worked as a “full-stack” designer on this project, taking charge on all primary and secondary research as well as designing, prototyping and user-testing all stages of the app. Our team comprised of researchers, UI designers and developers.
The Problem
Buying cars is a complex and potentially frustrating process, especially for first-time buyers. With too many different stages to think about – car selection, comparison, deal building, car trade-in, document signing – it is often difficult for users to seamlessly conduct all these operations completely online.
Business Problem: Information overload and lack of clarity during the buying process leads to increase in dependence on customer support (and hence increase in operation cost) and higher customer drop-off rate.
With our app, we designed a customer journey looking to solve these problems, providing a modern user interface to all user interactions and simplifying many of the processes related to car-buying. This is especially beneficial for dealerships, who often have outdated UX on their platforms and want to stay competitive in the long run.
Research
To start out, we looked at dozens of car-buying tools in the market and started noticing friction points as well as opportunities to improve the user experience. Using J.D Power’s list of best practices as a guideline, I conducted interviews with three different types of users in the US: first-time car buyers, veteran car owners and dealers. Dealer expertise proved very valuable as we conducted the first rounds of interviews, and the gathered insights validated our motivation to create an all-encompassing competitive product that would improve on what’s currently out there in the market.
Buying a car can be more complex than it seems. We not only had to cater to the user experience but also to the technical integrations in order to compete with the products in the market. For (almost) every step of the journey, we had to evaluate the leading edge 3rd-party tools necessary to make many interactions possible and communicate with dozens of stakeholders that go in the car-buying process. For example, users wishing to buy insurance when buying a vehicle will only use our product if it is integrated with an established and trustworthy vendor.
Complex challenges like this were among several identified during user research sessions, and validating this and other solutions before implementation was very important for the success of the product.
Designing from scratch
We conducted wireframing exercises, brainstorming and ideating as a group along with developers, PMs and business analysts. We developed our best ideas to low-fidelity prototypes and tested each stage of the experience on Maze – collecting key insights and tweaking our designs accordingly.
Creating a modern car-buying experience
Price Estimation
Pricing Transparency: Changes to the deal (down payment, mileage, add-ons etc.) reflect onto the monthly pricing shown in the footer in real time, will full price breakdown accessible at all times.
Trust: The app does not ask for any personal information before price is configured and calculated, and the user is onboarded once the entire deal is configured. This was a major pain point users had with other digital retailing tools.
User Onboarding
No disconnect: Email verifications are frustrating as they break the journey and create an experience disconnect for the user. Our onboarding process eliminates that.
Faster: Using an OTP (one time password) takes seconds to verify a user, where they can opt to use their phone number or email for OTP verification.
Deal Progress
Clarity: At every stage of the deal building process the progress bar shows the status of each step (completed) and the total number of steps remaining. Car-buyers often complain about the lack of clarity in the process and our app gives them more control.
Nonlinearity: Buyers can move between the steps and complete them in the order they see fit - something that no other retailing tool offers.
Test Drive
Convenience: Our research showed that test drives are a crucial part of the car-buying process, with 70-80% of buyers testing their drives before purchasing. However most retailing tools book test drive sessions offline, with most buyers having to set up appointments over the phone. Our app keeps test drive schedules for each available vehicle and lets the user schedule an appointment in-app.
Contracting
State-of-the-art contracting tool that lets buyers view, download and upload contracts and sign them digitally. Our platform allows for 3rd-party integrations for popular e-Sign tools like DocuSign that dealers can configure at their end, and lets buyers sign digitally in-app as well.
Key Design Principle: Personalization
Buying cars is a serious matter. Users should feel happy and confident when making decisions and their experience should be as personalized as possible. That is why we designed the app with personalization as a guideline for an optimal experience.
We designed for analytics being used at every product offering during the journey, and added optional questionnaires if users feel like giving more details about their preferences. The copy is extremely important in making a personable experience and we made sure to use user-friendly language when asking for inputs. For example, when entering car details for trade-in, we asked “How many miles have you driven on your vehicle?” instead of “Enter mileage”. Our research found that though subtle, these changes can have a compounded effect on user perception.
Results
The app was very well-received internally and with our subject matter experts. It was just made available on Appex Now, the unified app store of NETSOL’s products, and has already sparked interest of several interested OEMs. The next stage is to carry out further testing with users and interviewing them to see how well their needs are resolved.
While detailed analytics will be explored, the following metrics are some of the key factors in determining success of our product:
Drop-off rate (and parts of the journey where drop-offs happen)
Misclick rate
Time spent on each stage
Percent of “serious” users that go through entire process in one session
Reliance on customer service