Dealership App

StockSpark, aka CarSpark, had already an app, that barely was used by anyone. We were tasked to discover what was useful and what was not, for our customers.

My main contribution was on research, creation of prototypes and testing with users, as well working on the UI for the entire product which was more or less 5 years old at this point.

In order to really discover the user problems, we sent out to do several user interviews.

On them, we focused on what the users did on their daily tasks, to understand if there was any gap on our journey map. We also tried to understand how they used our current app, and we recorded all of this meetings.

We then organised all the data collected using Atomic Research.

"In short Atomic Research is the concept of breaking UX knowledge down into its constituent parts"

We first tag all the data on the video transcripts. This can be anything, like the feelings the user is showing to us at that moment, the features he would like to have, other tools he mentions, and other products.

After tagging, we collect all the insights and group them in an affinity map.

The most important deliverable at this point is a Story, which consists of a collection of insights. This is what we actually send to our stakeholders, like PO's and Head of Products. This is digested data in form of a very beautiful and compiled file, that lets everyone know our findings.

After we gather our insights, it's time to produce a solution. At this point I wire-framed some screens, so we could test them as soon as possible. This is one of my favourite parts on the project, as I get to try and solve problems of real people.

When I am designing, I like to always keep prototyping the solution. This way, I can test it myself as I go, very easily. This is also very important to be able to test with users quickly.

In order to test what we just built, we need to go back to our users. To do that, we used Maze, a testing software, that allows the user to play with our prototype, and we can get insights from this.

We know that the first time is never quite right, and so we spent some round doing improvements on the design, and making sure the solution answered the right questions.

I could really feel I was able to improve the way that our users used a mobile device to help them, making sure all of their feedback was heard.

The difficult part was in the beginning, getting an hold on real customers, as bureaucracies were not helping us. We did get to talk directly with 5 different dealerships in the end, which was incredible.