Carnversations

The ultimate car selling platform!

At a Glance

As a big fan of their Youtube Channel, I Approached Carnversations with a redesign of their website that I did as an enthusiast project.

They totally loved it, and we set out on a 6 month mission to come up with the ultimate car selling platform.

In 6 months, I delivered a complete Website design, Dealer Dashboard design and our very unique Checkout and Customer experience.

I was also responsible for the sourcing of an engineering team (Due to my background as a software engineer) and have also been working as the project manager of this project.

Timeline

6 Months (Ongoing)

Roles

UX Designer

Project Manager

Collaboration

2 Co-Founders

1 team of SWEs

Platform

Figma

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Client's Need

Carnversations is a motoring agency that deals with everything cars. On Youtube, they do car reviews, but also offer services such as motor vehicle pre-purchase inspection and car importation. A lot of these services are done manually, and as their popularity grew, so is the demand for their services.

They are looking for an online platform where they can offer modernize the car buying experience in Kenya, and leverage on their trust and brand.

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Problem

The current process is manual, and managed through:

Phone calls
Social Media DMs
Text Messages
Cash Payments

When demand rises above the capacity of the two co-founders, delivery is affected, and customer experience suffers. This limits the number of customers they can serve at a time, and hence reduces income for the team.

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Solution

I designed a website and car buying/selling platform for Carnversations, that has a simple yet incredible user experience, and allows people to buy cars from the comfort of their homes without the need to make a call or write a message. This enabled the team to serve more clients, and generated more money for the team, allowing it to expand rapidly over the last four months.

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Design Constraints

In this project, I had the following constraints:

Time: The team was rushing to compete with other upcoming players in the market.
Budget: The team runs a low budget operation, and so there was limited budget for activities like research.
Branding: The branding resources were not extensive, and I had to design a lot of the assets by myself.

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Process

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Competitive Analysis

The biggest strength of this platform is the strong and influential brand behind it. This creates a ready market, who are eager to test and buy from the platform. There is, however, the threat of many more upcoming similar platforms, even through from less reputable brands, and will poorer user experience.

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Interviews & Surveys

With the knowledge of Design Thinking, and extensive experience in conducting user research, I conducted interviews and sent out questionnaires to our car dealers and customers respectively.

Objectives (Dealers)

To understand the challenges that dealers face when selling cars online.
To determine how dealers currently use technology and tools to manage their businesses, and explore how the car buying platform can integrate with existing workflows and systems.
to assess the potential impact of the car buying platform on dealer performance, eg. increased sales.
To identify the features and functionality that are most important to dealers when using the car buying platform, eg. the ability to manage their inventory.
to understand how dealers perceive the value proposition of the car buying platform to their business.

I interviewed 6 of our “Platinum class” car dealers, whose responses and insights follow below. The platinum class dealers vary in size and sales volumes (from 5 – 200 vehicle units / Week), and these we felt are representative of a wide variety of our other current and potential dealers.

Objectives (Buyers)

To understand the challenges that buyers face when buying cars online.
To inquire buyers’ experiences buying cars online (Social media)
To understand buyers’ frustrations when they face con artists out to take their money.
To understand the most important things for a user when selecting a platform from which to buy a car.

I interviewed 15 of our most recent customers, most of whom we served through our traditional channels ie. Phone calls and social media. The buyers mostly constitute of mid range car buyers, since they are the majority of our customers. Budget and luxury buyers were also interviewed, and these we felt are representative of a wide variety of our other current and potential buyers.

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Findings from Intervews & Questionnaires (Dealers)

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #1

Dealers struggle with managing inventory.

Because dealers post their cars on different online and social media platforms, they often have a hard time managing their inventory, such as adding new cars and removing sold cars.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #2

Dealers struggle with difficult onboarding processes

Due to the fast paced nature of car dealerships, car dealers prefer a simple, easy to follow onboarding process, so as to leave time to attend to floor duties and sales.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #3

Dealers have a hard time proving their legitimacy on Social Media.

Due to the increasing number of con people stealing from unsuspecting customers, people have grown weary of dealers looking to sell cars on Social Media sites. This is because it has become hard to differentiate legitimate dealers from fake ones, and the real dealers end up suffering from this.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #4

Dealers are limited on the number of serious customers they can reach on social media.

According to dealers, a lot of enquiries on social media usually end up as dead ends, with an average success rate of 5 – 8%. With this, a lot of dealers prefer to only respond to online queries in their free time, or have someone dedicated to that.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #5

Dealers would want an all in one platform to sell their vehicles on.

80% of dealers said they would switch prefer an online platform, if that platform made it easier to sell their cars, was easy to use and was reputable and trustworthy.

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Findings from Intervews & Questionnaires (Buyers)

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #1

Buyers want a trustworthy platform.

Most buyers are looking to spend their life savings on a car, and this means that they are very weary of the platforms from which they buy a car. 96% of respondents said trust is an important factor when choosing a platform from which to buy a car.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #2

Variety is an important factor when choosing a platform.

Just like in retail, buyers want a platform where they can find a variety of cars to choose from. Buyers want to compare things like price, colours, trim levels and vehicle features, before they settle on the car to buy.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #3

Buyers want to physically see the car first, before they can pay.

Due to the increasing cases of people being conned of their hard earned cash, 78% of respondents said they had to see a vehicle first before making payment. The rest said they would trust an appointed and trusted agent for the purchase.

INTERVIEW INSIGHT #4

Buyers value consistent communication

82% of buyers said they had bad experiences with social media, where buyers did not respond to them in time or in a courteous language. This discouraged them from making purchases from dealers they had met online.

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Building Empathy

Using the quantitative and qualitative data from interviews and survey results, I defined the two target group profiles Anne (Buyer, 36) and Peter (Car Dealer, 45) to better empathize with my main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs.

Empathy Mapping

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Visual Design

After a long, iterative process, I was able to come up with the following screens for the landing page, car buying platform and dealer dashboard.

Landing Page

Vehicle Search

Vehicle Details

Vehicle Onboarding

Vehicle Listings

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What I Learned

This was definitely one of the most fulfilling products I have designed. it was a product of passion, both for cars and love for the channel. I enjoyed the process, highs and lows and the final highlight: The launch!

Below are some things that I learned during this project:

#1. Big challenges require small steps

Take small steps, because big changes can not be brought overnight, especially not just by an application alone. Accordingly, develop more strategically meaningful and realistically applicable tools that steer in the intended direction.

#2. Be open to research and let ideas go

‍I thought too digitally and approached the product with too concrete ideas about the result, thus failing to correctly take into account some needs and challenges of the target group and thus unfavourably defined the minimum viable product.

#3. Boots on the ground will often work magic

Before this project, i often depended on sending out questionnaires online, and I did not realize how much it inhibited the amount of information I would collect. Being on the ground and talking to users directly opened up the conversations, and I ended up collecting more information as a result. Also I improved my skills in conversational interviewing, where I made all my interviews more of conversations, and less of interrogations.

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Thanks for Reading!

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