Cox Automotive - UX Strategy

WHAT NEEDED TO BE SOLVED?

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When I first arrived at Cox, the UX team was being utilized as production and UI and not in a UX capacity.

• The first solve was to create understanding around UX for the stakeholders, Product and Engineering as well as the UX team.
• I took the team from being inside each product to have them sit together as a team and flesh out a future state for all the products.
• After developing a future state for ALL products (the client sees them as just 1 product) the edsigner could take that back to the teams and iterate towards that future state.

What Problems did my team solve for the user?

The Credit App is the one thing every user of the Dealertrack platform has to do. It is essential to their customers buying a car.

• Our users hated how long the app was, but they also used the keyboard almost exclusively while talking to their customer while "keying in" the information.
• Our goal was to simplify which type of buyer first, before they got to the meat of the application so it the information would be specific and relevant only for that type of buyer.

How we solved it

After having stakeholder and Subject Matter Expert task and prioritization workshop sessions with the Senior Product Directors, I learned what they really wanted was data-driven design. Well, that what I love hearing!

The old checklist was a little confusing and there were some tasks listed you may or may not even be able to do.

Since we were making the app itself more personalized, and there was often a co-applicant we felt like we needed to show them all in one screen instead of having the dealer go back and forth to see everyone.

• After some SME usability testing the new screens were quicker to scan.
• They were able to complete the tasks and see if something needed to be re-run or if something wasn't complete faster.

The product itself was a v2 of a product that was King of the Hill. The new version, wasn't released and had 8+ years of work done on it. Along the way we did a ton of whiteboarding, user stories, and a lot of working with Product to get what we had in our roadmap, and into theirs.

In the end of things, hiring the right people is what matters. You could have a whole group of mediocre UX'ers and get some things done, but even with a few great people, you can get a lot done. I was able to hire someone who had been on the Design System team and while I had dired him as a designer, he was able to do some usability testing right away and show the entire building how much user research and usability testing matters. He presented the testing results at the next Demo and he had a line of people wanting testing done by the time he got back to his desk.

How we measured success

• I created a "How we work with UX" document to help other leadership to understand how UX should work with others, and the importance of measuring success.
• To get the data we needed, I chose a screen recording tool called Auryc which is now part of a product called Heap.
• We did a variety of usability methods to get that data like surveys more testing and some followup user interviews to name some some of the methods.
• Time after time we were able to prove that given time to do research, design and testing, we could produce a product that users didn't hate when giving feedback.