Curbie Cars Inc. is an emerging online used car dealership in Canada. Our aim was to revamp the website's appearance, making it more streamlined and user-friendly, to enhance the overall experience of buying a pre-owned car.

When searching for a new used vehicle, users spend hours researching vehicles, reading comparison articles, and comparing prices – sometimes, while keeping their partners, family and sometimes friends involved.

I conducted a competitive analysis to understand what our competitors are doing and how we could improve our existing products. As all online dealerships have the same end goal, my focus was on what services different places offered and how they took their users from the purchasing process. 

A majority of the features were very similar, however, I noticed some main areas of focus that Curbie could improve upon to create a simpler experience for those looking to purchase a vehicle online:

• Automation 

• Saving and entering information when filling out forms

• User Delight

User flows were created to review all processes that could be completed throughout the online website. I looked for gaps and repetition as well as how to shorten some flows without reducing the amount of information being collected.

We found there were fields in forms and in other parts of the website that didn’t need so much customer interaction - they should be able to do more with less. We had a few areas on the website where a user may enter the same information multiple times - so why not store and auto-fill that data. This would allow us to ensure the website was already tailored to them.

There are a lot of users out there more concerned about heated steering wheels than what’s under the hood. The knowledge base of our customers ranged greatly and there is a large amount of content that needs to be provided to a user. Providing this information in digestible pieces throughout the website was a big challenge - and deciding how to cut down this copy without actually removing any of it from the site.

It’s a big process and a big decision, maybe they need to share with a spouse or get an opinion from someone who knows better - or they simply don’t have time to finish up and allow a user to pick up where they left off, we could easily create a way for a user to receive a magic link or a text if they provided that information but hadn’t made an account yet.