Drift
Drift is an end-to-end digital car buying platform that enables dealerships and OEMs to offer a customizable, web-based purchasing experience. It gives consumers full control over vehicle configuration and deal terms, while providing dealers with a unified system to manage pricing, inventory, and third-party integrations in real time.
I worked as the lead product designer on Drift, owning the design process from primary and secondary research to interaction design, prototyping, and usability testing across the entire experience.
Where car-buying breaks down
Buying a car online is still far more complex than it should be. While consumers expect transparency and control throughout the purchase journey, most digital car-buying experiences are fragmented across disconnected tools, unclear pricing structures, and manual dealer processes.
Industry research and interviews with dealers and buyers revealed that a significant portion of online car buyers abandon digital journeys due to fragmented tools and poor follow-up.
User problem: Buyers struggle to confidently complete purchases online due to unclear pricing, trade-in uncertainty, excessive back-and-forth, and a lack of visibility into deal terms. This often forces users to abandon digital journeys and fall back to in-person or assisted workflows.
Business problem: For dealerships and OEMs, this fragmentation results in high lead leakage, increased reliance on customer support, and operational inefficiencies caused by duplicate data entry and poorly integrated systems. Existing tools fail to support a true end-to-end digital buying experience, limiting both conversion and scalability.
What we learned from buyers and dealers
We reviewed dozens of digital car-buying tools and used J.D. Power guidelines of best practices to evaluate where existing experiences break down. We also interviewed three groups in the U.S. to understand pain points across the full journey: first-time buyers, experienced car owners and dealership stakeholders.
Across interviews, a consistent theme emerged: most platforms fail not because they lack features, but because they create uncertainty and friction at crucial moments, such as pricing, financing, trade-ins, scheduling, and paperwork. Buyers want to feel in control and confident throughout the process, and they abandon journeys when the experience becomes opaque, repetitive, or disruptive.
Transparency builds trust
Users want pricing changes reflected immediately with a clear breakdown.
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