NewVehicle

Buy Online

A vehicle purchase experience that can be embedded into dealership websites, and a secure checkout for Buyer’s to manage their car purchase.

Goals

For car buyers

Whether buying a car with cash or on finance, create an online purchasing experience that’s as transparent and seamless as possible.

For car sellers

Generate and display high quality leads by making a frictionless car purchase experience for buyers, themed to fit each retailer’s branding. Working from the philosophy that the better the experience is for the buyer, the more cars dealers will sell.

Scope

Leverage the business’s existing vehicle quoting technology by creating themeable lead generating tools, focused on helping buyers who want to get the best finance deal for their new vehicle.

At it’s core we wanted a finance comparison tool that dealers could integrate into their websites. Buyers can compare finance products for the vehicle they want, then continue on to NewVehicle.com to check their eligibility or apply. Sellers are then notified of the lead within a lead management system so they can take action.

Research

At the beginning I wanted to better understand how people felt about buying cars, in particular about buying on finance. There seemed to be a wealth of knowledge about the behaviour of car buyers online, but much less about finance specifically.

I planned the questions with our team then took to the streets and asked people around Manchester their thoughts.

We then card sorted the results into different types of buyers, then I created personas matching people to shopping behaviours and business opportunities, which became invaluable when designing many parts of the consumer UI.

One of the common worries that respondents expressed with buying online was trust and security. Finance applications inherently require very sensitive customer data (from employment history to bank details), and respondents commented that they’d need to trust a 3rd party website for them to enter this kind of information with confidence.

A lack of transparency with the finance process was also commonly expressed, with some respondents commenting on how they sometimes felt “left in the dark” when it comes to a finance deal. Some claimed sales staff may emphasise the monthly payment while glossing over interest rates, payment schedules, final payments and potential penalty fees for going over the mileage limits of a PCP finance deal.

From this one of the goals became compliance, security at every stage of the process.

Other take-aways included having clear and detailed vehicle information, the ability to save your progress during the application, and having the dealer information available from any step of the purchase.

Wireframing

The next sessions I brought devs together to brainstorm user flows, while I scribbled on the (WriteOn) walls.

Due to the size of the undertaking (quoting, eligibility checking, applications, an account) I formalized a process diagram in Miro to share how everything could fit together.

After lots of coffee, hundreds of variations and a few review sessions, the first designs for the new finance calculators, applications, and checkout were presented end-to-end.

Given that trust was a big factor, it was important to create a seamless experience for users transitioning from dealership websites to our checkout process. I sat down with developers to create a themeing guide that would allow each dealership to customize their checkout to their own brand, ensuring customers still felt at home when leaving the retailer’s site. A separate 'NewVehicle.com' UI guide was also created that could be expanded on if the business decided to have parts of the site unthemed and unrelated to dealerships.

Analytics and Optimisations

After release the product was a huge success shipping live to 800+ dealerships in the UK, with the number of leads generated up around ~35%. The following year I spent a lot of time burried in Google Analytics and Hotjar, setting it up, searching for weak performing pages and presenting hypotheses of ways we could make the process simpler and improve conversion rates on different pages.

One example of improvement was a change to the finance calculator and its following page. The calculator was the one area embedded on the retailer's vehicle page and received the highest number of impressions of any stage. Each quote had a "Learn More" call to action which lead to a "Finance Details" page with 2 options: Check Eligibility or Apply.

Drop-offs were highest at these two steps, so the hypothesis was to add a more direct call to action on each quote ("Apply Now" and "Check Eligibility") and move the finance details into the calculator, removing the need for the page inbetween a quote and applying or checking eligbility.

The change was beta tested to select retailers, and the results showed both an increase in engagement on the quotes, and considerably less dropoffs during the checkout, so the change was subsequently rolled out to all retailers.