Nate Jones

The Problem

Without fail, everyone who has ever bought a car from a dealer knows one singular truth about it. It is a horrible experience. It’s an unnerving coalescence of expense, powerlessness, and mistrust.

Research

I facilitated research sessions with in-market car shoppers, dealership owners and their sales staff – virtually, at our offices, at regional dealerships, and at international conferences.

Themes

We knew we had more than enough work cut out for ourselves, but a few main themes surfaced and were our main focus.

1. Simplify the process — spending at least three hours in the required final step to buy something is wild.
2. Make it easy to migrate all of your online progress to real life.
3. Support dealership salespeople so they feel like they had at least the same amount of tooling they had before.
4. And most importantly, enable the customer to trust what was happening in the entire process.

Challenges

Dealers still remained exceptionally reluctant to cede any power or information to shoppers, but failed to see how that short term sales upper hand ultimately betrayed their long-term relationship needs.

Car-shoppers had no way to know if prices were fair, what fees were legit, or how the sale was progressing, which led to an overwhelming distrust of every step in the process and the dealership. The pejorative stealership was born from this kind of feeling.

Process

In extremely close collaboration with the CEO/founder, we worked every day to name problems, identify opportunities, & map out solutions.

Those were wrong a lot.

But, I quickly created prototypes and got them in front of dealership customers and shoppers in order to fail as quickly as possible.

For hours each day, we would whiteboard ideas and then flesh out the details of what pursuing that version would mean for every step of the process for the shopper, the dealer, and the financial & government requirements for the deal.

If one of my prototypes performed promisingly, I’d manage the engineering team’s backlog and collaborate with them on conceptual and UI handoff.

Once it made it into production, the CEO and I would pour over analytics. As soon as we saw what features were failing, we would incorporate those findings into the subsequent iteration we were already prototyping.

Outcome

Online Shopper soft launched in multiple pilot dealerships and skyrocketed the amount of leads those stores received.

Instead of a disconnected process with too many invasive and decoupled touchpoints, the car buying process became several sequential steps that saw the shopper viewing actual payment figures from multiple banks.

The product provided so much additional actionable information to the salesperson, that they were able to overlook that the shopper was now also receiving details that allowed them to feel more in control of the process.

Plot Twist

As soon as the last piece of confetti was swept up from the launch party, we started work on the second version of the product, which was a radical departure. We knew we had built something really cool, but that there was an even better version inside of us. The entire research and prototyping phase began again and I also took over as product owner.

We launched the new version at the industry’s biggest trade show, NADA, and it blew everyone out of the water.

I demoed the new product to the Cars.com C-Suite – Cars.com would acquire Dealer Inspire just months later.

In the end, we had built something that stopped dealers from weaponizing information, empowered shoppers with knowledge & allowed them to trust their dealer.

In addition to having a successful product, the UX & UI patterns that I defined then became the foundation of the next generation of payment search on Cars.com.

Read about when I used the product as a shopper.