A New Search for ADESA.com

overview

ADESA provides wholesale vehicle auction solutions to professional car buyers and sellers. For buyers, ADESA has an online marketplace that allows buyers to participate in various auctions.

Challenge

The latest version of the site was built in the early 2000s. And it lacked a holistic approach to product development, resulting in a feature factory. Adesa realized a digital transformation was necessary to solve several problems. First, dated software architecture affects the site's speed. It causes difficulty in adding new features, meeting our customers where they are and mobile-first design, putting the customer at the center, and not repeating past mistakes. ADESA realized it needed to invest in UX design. As Lead UX, my goal was to instill UX as part of the agile process and to design relevant, fast, intuitive & actionable solutions for our customers.

Search is a core feature of a marketplace. If users cannot find what they are looking for, business suffers. We kicked off discovery and, during our audit, saw that the existing search was outdated, lacked focus, slow, missing advanced filtering, inaccurate, and no mobile support.

AUDIENCE/USER

buyers of adesa marketplace

TEAM

1 UX LEAD • 1 product manager • 1 business analyst • 1 TECH LEAD

ROLE

lead PRODUCT DESIGNER: RESEARCH & UX DESIGN

Research

Stakeholder Interviews • Generative Customer Interviews • Competitive Analysis • Site Audit • Personas • Customer Journey maps

I kicked off Discovery to understand the user behavior, needs and motivations. After conducting customer interviews to learn about their recent experience with our platform, I identified pain points and improvement opportunities.

These interviews allowed me to create personas and customer journey maps to inform our design.

Experience design is not only about the user. It is about bringing the users' & business needs together. To understand the business rules and requirements, I conducted stakeholder interviews. Additionally, I ran a competitive analysis to understand how we measure up to our competitors and any potential opportunities. Note I also believe in incorporating quantitative data available to make design-informed decisions. As this was a digital transformation, quantitative data was not yet available. Instead, we focused on customer feedback via support tickets and customer & stakeholder interviews.

Personas

DESIGN

User Flows • Wireframes • Mockups • Prototypes

We introduced design concepts which would expedite the search process and provide relevant results in attempts to convert faster.

Prototyping & User Testing

Rapid Prototyping • Moderated Remote User Testing

The design concepts were then transformed into an interactive prototype to be tested with our customers from a ‘client council’ that I created with the help of our operations and sales team. NNgroup has reported that five users can find 80% of problems. Therefore we took an iterative user testing approach. After each round of user testing, we would incorporate the insights from the previous session to reveal new feedback. This allowed us to dig deep into creating a solution.

Insights

Our users are time strapped and our site is data heavy. They want fuction over form (“pretty”). They want the right information in an easy to read format. And they want us to save them time. So search needs to bring back relevant and accurate results.

Next Steps

After completing product discovery and prioritizing features, work began with the team to develop our MVP for search.