Wholesale Car Dealer: Auction Vehicle Release App

An industry project to reduce friction and empower customers & associates when picking up vehicles won at a major used car dealer wholesale auction.

Overview

What: Research and design a prototype auctions vehicle release app for a wholesale car dealer as part of an innovation event that leverages a digital gate pass when picking up vehicles won at auction. Run a pilot at 1 location as a proof of concept.

Why: The current state experience is on paper. Paper is tedious to print, inconvenient, expensive, and outdated dot matrix printers were still in use. Discovery uncovered an opportunity to streamline vehicle pickup to reduce time, resources, and frustration for both customers and associates.

My Role

UX Researcher: During auction location on site discovery, I conducted field observation and several on the spot user interviews with customers and associates. I partnered with my team to find common themes and insights to identify opportunities and the best path forward. I also contributed to current state discovery ahead of the on site visit as a member of the core team.

Product Designer: During the innovation event, I helped build a Figma prototype in partnership with another Product Designer.

Delivery Manager: During implementation after the research and design phase, I was the delivery manager responsible for team execution. I continued to contribute to discovery and design discussion throughout the project.

The Team

This was a collaborative effort with the transaction experience product team. I partnered most closely with another product designer, the product manager, and a field lead during research and design. We we all reviewed insights and made decisions as a team.

Discovery Objective

Confirm our assumptions that there is opportunity to digitize the paper bill of sale and gate pass and modernize the process to help retire old dot matrix printers, save the company money, and find ways to address anecdotal customer concerns around the vehicle pickup process.

Current State Discovery

First we needed to understand how the current process worked, so we interviewed field leads. Here's what we found:

Vehicles were released at the gate after tender by presenting a crimped bill of sale from the business office, which was one of several copies printed on antiquated dot matrix printers.
An associate at the gate physically inspected the gate pass and verified the VIN visually on the vehicle and removed any company equipment.
The paper drive out slip was then filed away. The physical filing system had opportunities.
*We did identify an edge case of test drives at this stage, but opted to solve for that later and focus on the happy path.

Field Study/Observations

While observing customers in the lot, we noticed there was a big backup of cars trying to get through the gate.
Many times there was not an employee there at the gate ready to verify and release the vehicles, causing a lot of frustration and extra wait times.
Customers had to go into the business office to get the physical piece of paper, causing them to also wait in line indoors and waste more time.
We noticed many cars were staged outside the gate: we would later discover this is a complex edge case that needs to be solved for, but at the time we didn't dive deeper.
Customers looked frustrated and confused looking for their car, and asked for help, which made the extra gate wait times even more frustrating.
I spent a lot of time looking for cars with customers (in one case, unable to locate it) and tried to help find an associate to release vehicles at the gate when customers were waiting.

User Interviews - "on the spot"

Prior to the visit, I helped prepare an interview script along with the core team. (Most of the team was focused on interviewing and observing in the business office, but two of us focused on vehicle pickup)
I walked the auction location and interviewed at least 5 customers and interacted with many more willing to talk to us along with a team member.
This kind of ad hoc “on the spot” interviewing gains a lot of information in a very short amount of time. I also witnessed real customer emotions because they are in the experience as you are talking to them. *(I had experimented with this once prior for an academic industry project during my masters and had great results there as well. It works best in a pair so one researcher can ask questions and the other takes notes.)
Those we interviewed ended up confirming our observations and assumptions about their frustrations around vehicle release and the gate process, but the opportunity was even greater than we anticipated.

Insight analysis

At the end of the site visit, the entire team got together to discuss insights, themes, and opportunities across all the areas we were researching. Later I also helped document this in miro and held a retrospective to further debrief.

Key insights:

100% of customers we spoke to were frustrated by the pickup process and thought it needed improvement
The process was very time consuming, often taking hours
There is often only one gate open, and many times it is not manned, adding wait times
Customers have great difficulty finding their vehicles, adding to the pickup process frustration
Customers want a streamlined pickup process - they don't want to wait in line in the business office or at the gate
Customer want fast associate support when they need it
Customers found getting their paper drive out slip painful
Edge case: Some dealers have their cars staged outside of the normal process ("pre-release")

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Design Objective

Our team had an opportunity to participate in an innovation event (called "innovation garage") after our discovery. We felt compelled by what we learned to try to take this time to rapidly solve the customer vehicle release problem.

Based on our research and insights, our goal was to create an experience that:

Reduces friction when picking up a vehicle
Empowers the customer to self-serve
Empowers the associate to support the customer

Prototype ideation and design

Because it was an innovation garage event, we decided to dream a little bigger, knowing we could scale it back later.

Our initial prototype envisioned a fully self-service experience with a kiosk where customers could scan a QR code generated after tender and their vehicle VIN.
If successfully matched, the gate would open and they could leave, all while having a digital record of the vehicle release.

After the store visit, we started by brainstorming our innovation idea together, including outlining high level user stories, a general user flow, and prioritizing what we’d tackle during the innovation week.

Next, we put together some rough wireframes. Although we didn’t have time to test them with users, we ran the wireframes by the rest of our team before moving on.

For the high- fidelity prototype, I focused on building out the hub landing page (we envisioned this becoming a product with many more features later on), QR code and scanning instruction screen, and VIN scanning screens. My fellow designer focused on the other pages. I proposed the idea of toast messages, which ended up being implemented in the final product later on.

We then hooked up a click through prototype and demoed to the team for feedback. (See video top of this page)

Iteration & Pilot

Although our original objective remained (less friction, empower the customer, empower the associate), we ended up greatly simplifying the solution during implementation sprints after innovation garage and opted for a quicker path to pilot by eliminating the full self-service idea that we dreamed up during the innovation week. Our refined user flow was:

Generate an eGate Pass at time of tender
eGate Pass has a QR code that matches eBOS, VIN
Scannable on paper or on handheld customer device
Empowers the customer:
- eGate pass available to customer on their my transactions page
- No need to go to business office to get paper pass
- Ability to distribute to their transporters digitally to pickup on their behalf
Empowers the associate:
- Available on associate auction hub
- Ability for associate to print a hard copy if needed
- Implement mobile first Vehicle Release app for associates to scan QR codes at gate and match the vehicle for exit.

Pilot outcome

We piloted this app on handheld associate devices at 1 store location in parallel with the paper process, and we ultimately ended up turning the pilot off for now due to the following reasons:

Preliminary feedback was good, but associate adoption was low over time, in spite of training and reinforcement (Due to the parallel test, this was creating more work for the associate to do the process twice during the pilot - digital and paper. This would be solved once fully launched.)
Edge cases discovered ended up being blockers we'd need to solve before scaling:
- Test drives (discovered and deprioritized earlier, but came up again during pilot)
- Vehicle staging outside the gate due to space interrupted the vehicle release planned user flow ("pre-releases")
- Issues related to handheld device sharing between associates need to be addressed
Team priority shifted to another project, so the pilot was halted, with an intention to pivot back in the future.

Lessons learned:

It would have been better if we spent time solving for edge cases before piloting (Another deeper phase of research between innovation and development).
However, sometimes the fastest way to learn is to get a pilot out there in the real world and pivot from there as you learn more. There is value in that. I don’t think this was a failure, just not the quick happy path win we were all hoping for.
Had this remained a priority, the next steps would have been to interview store associates and/or leverage our field leads to map out all the existing use cases and ideate on how to close or accommodate those gaps in our design and then re-test. We would also then want to check in with customers as well to get feedback on the new process. I'm confident that we understand the customer problem from prior discovery, and that the opportunity justifies reprioritization.

Wins: We ended up implementing digital eBOS and eGatePass at all locations so we were able to retire the dot matrix printers as a result of our research, which was a big win for the company and associates. Customers can access and print their gate pass from their my transactions page, but unfortunately will need to still go to business office for crimping the document until we reprioritize this work.