Celebrate the imperfections
Designed whilst I worked at Cazoo
Integral to Cazoo’s success is maintaining trust with customers. They do this by subverting the used car sales industry and highlighting a vehicle’s imperfections instead of trying to hide them.
Discovery Kick Off
The kick-off goal was to get everyone on the same page by following clear objectives. This included; identifying stakeholders, framing the problem, managing expectations and planning individual activities & next steps.
Due to the pandemic, we completed this exercise remotely via Google Hangouts. My role was to support the lead product manager and facilitate the kick-off workshop via Miro.
Quick analysis
Many of our processes were not aligned and often were just short-term quick solutions that were never reviewed. This was now having an impact on the customer experience.
the main questions:
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Why are we not meeting our customers expectations?
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How are customers expectations being formed in the first place?
Empathise
Discovery kick-off helped establish leads as to the source of the issues affecting customer trust. My responsibility inhabited the upper funnel of the customer journey, before following any assumptions we needed to verify our information.
I collected data from our internal logging systems and scrutinised recent Trustpilot reviews. Along with the Lead Product Manager, we listened back to recorded customer calls. I launched a short usability test on usertesting.com to gather quick usability insights on mobile vs. desktop experience.
Learning highlights
Post-sales issues were steadily increasing and costing the company a lot of money
Many customers complained about unexpected imperfections
9/10 of devices used to browse and convert on the web do so on a mobile device
“...the car that arrived had all these imperfections that weren’t listed on the website. So, I went back and realised I never saw there was more than one image in the gallery. I suppose it was a bit stupid of me, I didn’t see it on my mobile...”
Define
The content designer, user researcher and I analysed the data we had collected and construed a plan for which areas needed improving. Along with the Lead Project Manager and Engineering Manager we were able to prioritise the areas recommended for an optimisation review.
Being a remote-based team it was important we didn’t silo ourselves and restrict creative collaboration. I hosted goal-driven pairing sessions to write problem statements and present ideas for the optimisation review. We created a soft timeline to help prioritise issues to tackle.
Stakeholder management
The web page has never been optimised for mobile since launch, however stakeholders wanted to see post-sales issues improving immediately.
Problem Statement
Poor usability in the mobile experience of the imperfection gallery is misleading users and increasing post-sales issues as upset customers return their vehicles.
We know feature interaction of the imperfection gallery is lower on mobile than on desktop. By addressing the usability issues on mobile we plan to improve feature interaction by more than 5%.
What we did next
As a team, we voted to split the improvement of the imperfection gallery into two initiatives:
relieve Stakeholders’ anxiety via a fast deliverable
gain a holistic understanding of the customer’s definition of an imperfection
Ideation
I first scribbled ideas on paper and discussed the design problem with other teams' designers to bring a fresh perspective. I also involved engineers in separate discussions to make sure I did not start prototyping a design that would be far too complex to develop.
My scribbles varied from quick ideas to complex and unique, I then presented my wireframes at a design critique.
Lightbulb moments
By discussing my solutions with other creatives I uncovered unexpected areas of innovation.
Prototype
I designed two variations of an improved imperfection gallery based on unmoderated user testing. Using interactions on Figma, I was able to communicate the required changes more authentically to engineers and stakeholders.
Whilst pairing with engineers and getting input from data analysis, we decided the best approach to prove the most optimal design for users would be an A/B/C test. We rolled out the test on all three of the galleries currently displayed on a vehicle detail page as we believed it would disrupt the experience the least and give more reliable results.
Mindful considerations
Reusable components in our design system make for faster release time
What we change on mobile must also consider desktop
note Unseen here is Variation C, this was designed during live pairing with engineering in handover and only required a small tweak of UI.
Test
We monitored results closely the first few days after release in case something negatively impacted the user experience.
The test was planned to run for 4 weeks, but even after two weeks, there was already a clear winner.
UX Success
Variation B was the clear winner as feature interaction increased by 25%.
Final words
What went well.
The handover to engineers was very easy due to involving them in the ideation process much earlier. They received no nasty surprises nor had misaligned expectations.
What blockers I faced.
We had a strong focus on releasing Cazoo in the EU meanwhile doing constant improvements to the current site. This meant it was sometimes difficult getting the engineering capacity to work on my solution.
How I dealt with problems.
I really wanted to do a deeper research piece to gain a holistic understanding of the customer’s definition of an imperfection. In the end, I had to negotiate a compromise in which we were all as a team happy.
What I would have done differently.
In the excitement of seeing the test go live, I did not do a final review with a content writer which led to some misunderstandings for users in the text.
Cazoo
Alex Chesterman OBE founded Cazoo in 2018 to make buying and selling a car as simple and seamless as ordering any other product online today. The experience has been described as “the Amazon of the used car market”. Since launching in the UK late 2019, they have expanded across Europe including Italy, Germany and France.