More clients, more problems
Automotive brands generally release special discounts on a monthly basis, and dealerships race to advertise the lowest payments possible to drive customers into their stores. One of the services provided by the company is to create all of the visual artifacts that go into those monthly campaigns.
As the client base continually grew alongside the channels for advertising, the amount of work became completely unmanageable over the first week of the month, and then dropped off significantly over the rest of the month.
I knew that ramping up weeks two, three, & four for two months in order to build out an atomic template library would be a pain in the ass at first, but would make future them waaay happier in the long run. In order to get there though, we had to figure out a way to wean clients from a custom-first mindset that was so labor intensive.
Fresh & Ready
Fortunately the product owner had a vision & appetite for charting a new way forward that would ease the pain of ordering new assets and promote using assets that could be more easily prepared. He called it the Fresh & Ready approach — just like the pizzas that are too good to pass up.
We met a few times to discuss his needs and I got to work on the ordering journey map that tracked how the data would be acquired and applied and how each group of stakeholder would interact with the request.
The steps weren’t overly complicated, but I retained the goals of (1) easing the pain of ordering and (2) promoting packages over bespoke assets.
The existing process focuses on requesting an individual asset — say a website banner — and then being asked what you would like on that banner. By transitioning the process to programatically collecting published special payments & using those as a basis to order a collection of assets for each offer, we could remove much of the tedium while also prompting the client to choose from a curated suite of related assets.
Nobody thinks they like templates
Sure, nobody admits to liking templates, but we believed we could tip the scales by adding convenience into the mix. By making it easy enough to order a cohesive collection, that would outweigh the desire to custom order individual assets.
Now we wait
The wireframes are done and being discussed with the stakeholders, so we’ll have to wait and see for the high-fidelity artifacts to be created.
Through extensive collaboration with the product owner, and thorough review with the CTO, there is a lot of momentum and faith that this product will redefine & invigorate a neglected area of the business.
Client:
Dealer Inspire
Role:
Product Designer
Skills:
Product, Strategy, UX design, Product design, Wireframes, Prototyping, User flows
Nate Jones 