FusionZone Automotive
An Expedite and Engaging Car Search Experience
Overview
Nowadays, conversions are the lifeblood of digital marketing. More website conversions mean a higher likelihood of sales. Dealerships spend thousands of dollars (or more) per month on increasing website traffic. They simply think the more visitors you have, the more leads you are likely to get. However, the sad facts are the average conversion rate on the dealership's website is 0.75% which means that less than 1% of all website visitors fill out a lead form. Why is that?
Challenge: How can we build an intelligent and engaging website that can help auto dealerships increase conversions and turn more leads into sales?
Background
FusionZone Automotive offers dealers highspeed, customized, and responsive websites. It already serves over 1,500 dealerships in the US and Canada. FusionZone is a certified provider for multiple OEMs, such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, CDJR, and Ford. FusionZone aims to offer intelligence solutions and technologies that can help dealers to sell and service more cars.
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Clients requests != Users needs
Adding more forms and CTAs are not the solutions to improve the conversions. Based on research and data analysis, we found that some of their requests actually hurt conversions. Below are the key insights we found that need to be addressed to have a delightful experience for our customers:
Quick and Easy
Car buyers want their online experience to be more effortless and less time consuming to find and buy cars.
To the point
The information design is chaotic and inconsistent. Car buyers want to see critical information immediately without being overwhelmed with less relevant content.
Streamline Decision Making
Users expected that the website should help them to save their time in decision making by personalized recommendations. They want to have an in-store guided shopping experience, which can help them to find a car that matches their unique needs and deliver a positive and confident personal experience.
Hassle Free
Most car buyers hate wasting time and energy to negotiate.
Ideation
Based on the customer insights we gathered through the user and market research, I used the “How Might We” frame method to explore ideas that can help us solve the design challenges.
Search experience
This is a fun and big project, and there is a lot to say. However, I’ll use the redesign search experience as an example of my design thinking process.
Design Goal: Update the search results page to give users greater freedom and flexibility to drill down search results and to find what they are looking for easily
I’ll use the percentages of conversion rate, bouncing rate, and drop-offs rate from the car listing page to the car detail pages to measure success.
I’m too impatient for this!
You might be familiar with this scenario: you are shopping online, and you have some criteria in your mind already, but due to the poor filtering experience, you are forced to browse a long list of generic items. After some scrolling, you start to lose your patience for finding the few relevant items in those large product lists. You end up abandoning the site with an unhappy face.
This happens to our websites as well. According to google analytics and hotjar reports, there was a large drop-off from the car listing pages to the car detail pages. Lots of users left the site without finding a car they wanted. This became our number 1 concern in terms of usability.
Investigating the existing
Firstly, I need to look at our competitors' car listing pages. The goal is to understand how competitors are currently doing in the market. I have gone through their search result page and also have done a heuristic evaluation to identify their weaknesses and strengths. Below is a quick chart of a general evaluation.
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Key Insights
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We don’t have feature facets.
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The whole page reloads after applying each filter value.
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It does not support multiple searches.
Card sorting
Which filter facets are considered by car buyers most when they are searching for cars?
After much studying, I found out that different web providers use different filter facets. I conducted a card sorting interview with users to understand what facets people consider the most when they are searching for cars.
The price filter facets were one of the most used, however, it was located at the bottom of the filter section. Car feature was one of the common filter usages as well. Based on the above data, I have since rearranged the order of the filter facets.
Contextual inqury
To get a deeper insight into how a user actually uses our search filter, I conducted a contextual interview to identify the user experience issues. Seven individuals were tested using the quantitative metric. They were asked to filter cars that are between $8,000 ~ $15,000 with a backup camera features.
Task: Interviewers were asked to filter cars that are between $8,000 ~ $15,000 with a backup camera feature.
Discovery
Once I developed a deeper understanding of my user and their needs, I identified the common pain points from my usability test through affinity mapping.
Design goals
Based on the testing results, users struggled to find cars that best suited their needs and queries. Our design goal was to allow the user to quickly drill down their search results and find their desired car within 2 minutes.
Allow the user to quickly drill down search results and find their desired car within 2 minutes.
An efficient and intuitive car filter process
Following user-centered design principles, each design was repeatedly evaluated and iterated. I wanted to highlight the following design decisions.
1. Clean and minimal design with a clear hierarchy
Car dealership websites represent car dealers. A simple design makes a great first impression and looks more professional. People are more likely to buy cars that have a showcasing website that looks professional. With a clean and minimalist design, it will increase the credibility of the business. Further, car buyers can scan through the full page from top to bottom and locate the desired information faster.
2. The filter bar is prominently displayed and pinned on the top
According to user testing and the heatmap study, users often mistake the site’s sorting tool for the site's filtering tools. The old Sort By design also didn’t show user sort order options. For example, when the user clicks price, they won’t be able to tell ascending or descending order until the page reloaded and checked the first-page inventory’s price. The new filter bar design can avoid misinterpretation with the sorting tools for filters. It is often pinned to the page so that the filter is still available as the user scrolls. According to user testing, the new filter bar design is more discoverable and intuitive to use.
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3. Enhancing the user experience with Ajax and letting the user select multiple filters
During user testing, we realized that three major issues need to adjust.
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Participants mentioned they couldn't find price filter.
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They expected to be able to select multiple values all at once.
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They think that our search filter is slow and inefficient because the entire page will reload each time after they refine option.
The new filter bar allows visitors to apply multiple filter items of the same facet. By using the horizontal filter bar, we have multiple flexible ways to present available options. Rather than just a checkbox, we can use icons or symbols. According to user testing, participants are quickly recognized and instantly understand.
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4. Adding thematic filters
I interviewed a few car sales assistant in physical stores. They mentioned that a lot of shoppers evaluate cars by relating them to their lifestyle need. Whether for a daily commute or occasional adventures. Such as “more trunk space” or “sports car” etc. So I added thematic filters to match some common and central aspects of car buyer’s purchasing decision.
5. Promoting important filter items or sales
Our clients often to use banners to promote sales and place them everywhere. According to user testing, these banner-like graphics were entirely ignored by the test subjects. I created a box that can display all featured filter items or sales to avoid the banner blindness.
Result
Four participants were tasked to complete the same tasks for the interactive prototype, and all 4 participants completed the tasks successfully. Participant 2 mentioned that this design was much more intuitive to use than the old version. Participants were able to walk through the entire prototype and find the car in under 2 minutes.
Next steps
For my next iteration, I would like to make our website smarter and more personal with the machine learning algorithm. One thing I will do differently for search results page is to make the promoting filter item box and banners more personal to each shopper based on their browsing behavior and information that shoppers are willing to share about their personal lifestyles.
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