CarLotz’s Vehicle Value Estimator
TL;DR:
Led the discovery, design, and dev-handoff stages of CarLotz’s first online vehicle valuation tool. The product successfully solved a user problem (getting a sight-unseen estimate) and business challenge (introducing a difficult to grasp consignment model).
Responsibilities
Strategy
Customer & usability research
Customer journey mapping, wireframing, and prototyping
Visual system design
The Don’t Look Back Dan CarLotz personas I speak with commonly express urgency in their need to sell. The right time is often right now. Fortunately Dan has no shortage of online options for getting a real-time offer by answering just a few questions about the condition of their current vehicle. Used car retailers like CarMax, Carvana, and Vroom guarantee a trade-in price (pending an in-person review). Unfortunately for Dan, that trade-in estimate is usually a few thousand dollars less than what the car is actually worth (these companies have to make money, after all!).
Unfortunately for CarLotz, the unique Consignment option that promises to give Dan the best of both worlds – a higher trade-in price for their car without all of the hassle or selling on a private marketplace – can be a difficult concept to understand.
And the convoluted way it was presented on the website – a not-responsive, third party, iFrame experience that one user research participant called “data vomit” – wasn’t doing us any favors either. CarLotz was losing the vast majority of visitors like Dan to the Sell landing page because, at a glance, we did not seem to provide the same speedy valuation and selling process that is critical to Dan.
I hypothesized that by positioning the higher than trade-in consignment value for Dan’s car beside an “easy and fast instant offer” – like the ones he was getting elsewhere – CarLotz would convince more car Sellers to become car Consignors.
Nearly five combined years of customer interviews in the used car space has taught me that customers use at least three different online resources when determining the value of their car. For CarLotz’s experience to be successful I knew it would need to deliver more value (an instant offer and consignment estimate at the same time) while being no more difficult to engage with than our competitor’s tools. A competitive analysis and close partnership with CarLotz’s internal Buying team helped me hone in on the most essential questions we’d need answered to place a sight-unseen offer on a car; this customer journey is known internally as the Vehicle Value Estimator (VVE).
Diagramming the VVE end-user flow made it possible to itemize the user interface components we’d need at each step of the process for capturing the necessary user inputs. I turned the distinct input types into reusable and flexible components so that we could quickly stand up each step in the flow. The component library that drives VVE incorporates the atomic atoms and molecules of the CarLotz Design System to deliver a set of experience-specific organisms, templates, and pages.
Armed with a library of components, I stitched together our first end-to-end, high-fidelity prototype to gather feedback from users.
I focused the bulk of my moderated research questions in these sessions on VVE’s big payoff moment: the Instant Dual Offer screen. My chief hypothesis hung on users being intrigued enough by two car values that they’d be enticed to learn more about CarLotz’s unique value proposition.
The research indicated that I was definitely headed in the right direction. Users reacted positively to getting another valuation for their car in a process that felt very familiar, and were pleasantly surprised to get a bit more: CarLotz’s unique consignment estimate
But I also identified some areas of opportunity:
We elected to launch this first version of the VVE after making only a handful of adjustments based on user feedback so that we could learn more about user behaviors at scale. The utility immediately began returning business value – the volume of Sellers getting valuations on their cars from CarLotz’s website increased almost 4x in just a month.
While we continued to monitor VVE’s MVP through a nationwide rollout, I went back to the drawing board to address the biggest opportunity identified in our research: users who were eager to learn more or even sign up to consign their car had no clear next steps. This learning was not entirely surprising – the MVP was purposefully designed to get a customer’s info into the hands of a CarLotz Teammate who would follow up with an email, SMS or phone call to talk about next steps. To empower the Seller to take the next step I iterated on the dual offer moment to include a self-service appointment option. VVE’s second version was also simplified to allow the complementary values to stand out.
Designing, testing and launching the Vehicle Value Estimator has been an energy boost for the entire organization. The loud and clear feedback we heard at every step of the way – used car consignment is unique and enticing to large segments of the used car market – has reinvigorated CarLotz’s disruptive mission.