Shopping Assist

Reaching a new audience while helping customers and dealerships communicate easier.

Overview

In the last 2 years, a variety of factors have triggered a worldwide vehicle inventory shortage, making the perfect car that much harder for a customer to find.

My team and I were asked to propose a new feature that could utilize customer’s site history for more personalized service at dealerships, and through our exploration discovered the need for an enhanced experience for dealers receiving leads as well.

Our new type of lead helps both the customer and the dealer communicate better before the customer ever walks into a dealership. This project was a huge undertaking with many stakeholders, and went through major pivots based on feedback from testing.

This feature launched on the MBUSA website in November 2022.

Project Details

Client: Mercedes-Benz USA

Design Team:

  • 1 UX Designer (Myself)

  • 1 Visual Designer

  • 1 Copywriter

  • as well as a Creative Director, Project Manager, and several Developers

Key Deliverables:

  • User research & synethesis

  • Concepting & ideation

  • Concept testing

  • Wireframes

  • Usability testing

  • Prototyping

The Challenge

Customers are doing so much research on the MBUSA.com website before contacting a dealership.

How can we use their existing research to provide a more personalized experience?

The Website

The role of the MBUSA.com website is to facilitate the customer’s exploration of the brand, and guide movement from online research to offline sales.

Or, to put it simply, the website’s purpose is to get customers to the point that they’re ready to walk into a dealership.

Customers can contact dealers on the site via a generic contact form with little information (as shown here), or through a more detailed contact form about a specific vehicle of interest.

Throughout this case study, I’ll refer to these contact forms as leads.

User Research - The Customer

I began conducting user research to identify groups of customers who are not likely to reach out to dealerships through our current channels.

Based on strategy work and stakeholder interviews, including dealers at dealerships, I identified two major types.

The key commonality is that both types of users will struggle to reach the point of finding a specific vehicle to contact a dealer over - either due to a lack of time to search or lack of knowledge to narrow their options.

My team and I decided to focus on crafting a contact form for these users that could be personalized without requiring them to have found a specific vehicle of interest on a dealership lot.

User Research - The Dealership

To understand dealerships better, I formed a dealer panel, a mix of representatives of dealerships of various sizes and different geographical regions.

I would continue to work with this panel throughout the design, development, and launch of the product, and their insights were critical for ensuring the final product meshed with the dealerships’ ways of working for easy adoption.

Our early discussions showed that the current lead management systems for dealerships weren’t prepared to handle the increased information detailed leads could pass on.

We needed a way to control the format that the information is received and viewed in, and expanded the pitch concept to include an enhanced lead readout for the dealers.

Initial Concept

I pitched the idea of a 2-sided experience:

  • Customers convert their online research into a personalized lead

  • Dealers access these leads through a link to a page that we control

My team and I began developing a concept around the idea of a personalized lead that could create a feel of concierge style service.

In this way, a dealer takes on the role of a personalized shopper, meshing their expertise and knowledge of the Mercedes-Benz vehicle lineup with the customer’s preferences and dealbreakers.

This type of feature, collecting user preferences for the digestion of a salesperson, not a machine learning system, is not common in automotive websites, and was a new type of lead for the Mercedes-Benz USA system.

I determined that our experience would come down to balancing the tension between two sides:

  • Asking for the least amount of information from customers, to make the experience easy to engage with and prevent drop off

  • While asking the questions that most help the dealer prepare for the first meeting with the customer

Initial Wires & Concept Testing

Because this is such an unusual experience for an automotive site, my team and I decided to focus on building wires and designs for the happy path version only of the customer-facing flow and then conduct concept testing before going into full creative. And what a great call that was!

In the early concept testing, I discovered we’d made some huge errors.

Without proper messaging, users thought the flow felt like a low-commitment recommendation quiz, and didn’t understand they were contacting a dealership.

Additionally, it was just too much work!

Instead of making it easier to reach out, all the context we were asking made the user less likely to fill anything out.

What Happens When You Have to Start All Over

What did I do? Go back to step 1 and re-evaluate from our base principles and research.

We completely restarted back to basic flows and asked ourselves the same question we had before:

“How do we ask the minimum number of questions that dealers will still find useful?”

This gave us a new, simplified flow - a basic set of questions that anyone could answer at a high level, regardless of the time they spent on the site, but that could be personalized by a user’s past actions.

Updated Wires

Now I had a clearer flow, a way to engage a wider swath of users, and a concept that made their experience quick, painless, and clearly advantageous.

All questions are now light, digestible, and focused on major deal-breakers for both customers and dealers.

Any saved custom vehicle builds or inventory can be shared, skipping some of the questions as items like preferred color are extrapolated based on the shared vehicles.

It was also at this point we designed and tested the dealer-side experience with several dealers from our dealer panel.

The dealer view shows a high level summary than progressively more detailed information for those who wish to read further.

(Designs produced by the team’s visual designer as shown as the wires are no longer accessible.)

Final Designs and Prototype

I have included a few animations showing the user side of the experience, with designs made by my team’s visual designer, and the full experience can be seen here on the MBUSA.com site.

High Level Questions Flow

Saved Vehicles Flow

Launch & Early KPIs

Our finalized designs took the many pieces of feedback from our testing and the end result launched in November of 2022, with early analytics showing:

  • 600 leads produced in the first 2.5 weeks

  • 25000 visits in the first month

  • 7.7% completion rate in its first month, making it the dealer contact form with the highest completion rate on the site

Summary

This was a major undertaking and a substantial piece of work, which I was involved in from early concepting and pitching through testing, final designs, and the entire development cycle.

My team and I juggled major reworks based on testing and feasibility, and the end result is a unique approach that will benefit our entire process of facilitating contact between customer and dealer. 

For me, it was a major learning experience in challenging “standard” practice, rolling with major changes, and adapting to a large pool of consumer needs.

I look forward to seeing how the feature performs now that it’s out in the world!