Car Inventory Management
The challenge
The purpose of this project was to design a system where a car dealership could manage their vehicle stock.
Managing the vehicle stock of a car dealership is a complicated task. It includes the ability to add, manage and transfer new or used vehicles across dealerships and regions.
It was challenging to learn how a dealership works in order to design a user interface where a user could easily perform all these different types of actions.
What I did
Discover
Using a variety of user research methods with dealers and system administrators I identified how they currently manage their vehicle stock and what are their current painpoints.
For example I noticed that is important to add multimedia (pictures, videos) for each vehicle and they change vehicle prices very often, especially on used cars.
Define
Empathy map
Based on the initial research I created empathy maps to help the team consider how the users are thinking and feeling. This gave us a good lead in order to create representative personas later.
UX mapping method
Using another ux technique we defined the actions, emotions, questions and painpoints of our target audience. With that way and in combination with the empathy maps we gathered knowledge about our target audience. The next step was to create 2 personas.
Personas
Sitemap
After defining the user stories with the Product Owner, we mapped out the features and categorise them. Then we created a sitemap which provided an overview of the platform’s content structure.
UI Design
High fidelity UI
After ideation, refinement, testing and stakeholder feedback, we designed the User Interface using Sketch and created interactive prototypes using inVision.
Styleguide
Because of the complexity of the platform, we created a styleguide in order to have consistent UI components & UX patterns. This helped developers to efficiently implement the UI.
Evaluation
An evaluation of the existing website took place by comparing its content and functionalities with 247 usability guidelines.
Based on the evaluation we got the overall usability performance. We were able to define some minor usability issues and fix them where relevant.
Conclusion
The biggest accomplishment was that I understood the complex workflow of car dealerships between different markets and countries and introduced a new user interface that matched their expectations.