Toyota SmartPath
Online Purchasing Experience
Designed a new fully online purchasing experience for Toyota, which is currently scaling to become an end-to-end shopping, buying, owning, and servicing experience. Solving a huge pain point for Toyota customers and also increasing dealership partnership and adoption from 150 to 600+.
my role
Senior Product Designer
Responsibilities: UX Strategy, UX Research, Competitive Analysis, User Flows, Wireframes, Visual Design, Prototypes, Design System Components, Functional Specs
2 Product Designers, 2 Contract Designers, 1 Client Partner Manager, 1 Project Manager, 1 Copywriter, Multiple Internal Toyota Development teams
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Zeplin
team
Q1-2022 _ Q2-2022
PLATFORM
Responsive Web
01
overview
Due to the COVID pandemic when most retail shops getting closed down, Toyota needed to bring their onsite dealership experience into the digital realm. That’s when they decided to enhance their dealership-oriented inventory and payment estimator tool into SmartPath - the fully online car buying experience. A fundamental pain point for Toyota users is buying their car at a dealership and the overall feeling of dread of the sales pitch. While this problem has been solved with other platforms, we focused on creating a tool to allow Toyota’s users to fully purchase their vehicle online from lot to delivery.
Q1 -2022 _JAN
02
assessment
The SmartPath Platform Design team was given this opportunity to assess the current shopping tool and have requirement working sessions with Toyota Product Owners in order to understand the problem.
Problem:
People don’t trust dealerships. The pandemic, car shortages, and unpleasant experiences, geared customers to focus online, and Toyota followed suit.
Solution:
Build an online purchasing experience for Toyota.
Goals
End-user: Decrease customers timeline in person estimated 6-8 hours in the dealership; Launch - Have 10 purchases finished through SmartPath in the 1st month
Dealers: Decrease initial dealer processing time 10-12 hours
Toyota: Increase dealer adoption with the goal of accruing more than 100 dealership partnerships.
Needs:
End-user: Convenient online tool for reviewing costs, buying, and scheduling their purchased vehicle without the hassle of long in-person hours at the dealership.
Dealers: Automating documentation processes to quicken the purchasing process, and allowing them time to focus on helping users finalize their purchases.
Toyota: Enable the Toyota platform to serve as a centralized hub for both vehicle purchases and dealer documentation processes by providing a best-in-class digital experience throughout the user journey. Success metrics focused on garnering dealer adoption of the tool and boosting loyalty to guests by providing a more transparent shopping process.
Q1 -2022 _JAN
03
discovery “sprint 0”
Marketing Research
Coming into the project a couple months deep into initial discovery and ideation, there was a lot of knowledge transfer I needed to do, but I hit the ground running. Curiosity overdrive. Partnering with the strategy team, UX research, client partners, and with our small but mighty design team we worked through analyzing market research, user research and virtual whiteboard sessions to identify key findings and strategic objectives.
Multiple platforms claim that their customers are able to purchase the vehicle completely remotely on their site. Yet in reality, there process is disjointed, inhibiting the customer’s desire to test drive, sign all documentation, and receive firm prices over the web or phone
Platforms that had a holistic solution and seamless transition between each step offered a better customer experience than the platforms providing basic desking tools for dealerships in certain, limited steps.
Most platforms integrate with a third-party appraisal company, such as KBB, in order to give the customer an instant offer to assist in lowering final cost of vehicle and make their budget more manageable.
User Research
I tag teamed with the UX Researcher and Product Designer on our team to conduct some quick user interviews with 8 participants that fit the criteria of “Have you bought, leased, or traded a vehicle recently?” Below are some key findings and patterns we utilized to implement as a baseline with our designs.
“I was at the dealership for 8 hours! The sales reps would come in and out and it felt like eternity.”
“I used Google to start researching. Carvana, Carmax etc. Used Kelly Blue Book to value the car I was driving and did alot of long talks with dealers and sales people”
“I buy Toyota’s because they’re reliable and last longer. I don’t trust dealerships to be honest and give me fair price when I decide to buy.”
“I don’t want to use dealers because they are annoying. I don’t want to deal with a salesperson. I know better than to trust everything a dealer says.”
Brainstorming
Based on the research depth, we were able to extract the pain points from users, business need’s, and Carvana’s main framework of funneling users into their shopping buying platform was an ideal start to work with that flow and enhance it with our dealer partnership knowledge. We started by creating a holistic user journey to assess and remove major stressors and pain points that caused the process to be longer.
Q1 -2022 _FEB-MAR
04
design solutions
Wires+Review
We had a pretty short deadline to get the designs into development. Hammered through as many wires for the enhancements to the overall purchase flows. This included taking a look at the current process end-to-end and laying out the wires to make a cohesive step-by-step flow. We would both review the work to make sure we wouldn’t be missing any edge cases.
Visual Design+Review
After the sprint cycles for wires, we went into visual design. This part was tough. The platform team and other verticals were working through a large-scale redesign on top of moving from one design workflow process to another (Sketch+Invision+Zeplin into Figma). We needed help with executing this and so I negotiated with production to bring on a couple of contracted Visual Designers, who I oversaw and mentored through the process of conversion. We had an iterative process of bringing any legacy elements we needed into Figma. I would consult to the technical scalability of SmartPath focused components and would contribute to the newer Design System being developed.
Q2 -2022 _APR
05
iterate+review+test
Prototype+User Testing
This was the fun part! We had to put together a long flow based on the max state use case, so we could get as much measurement of timing and insights of what our users thought of the process. The UX research team conducted 16 interviews over a 2 week sprint cycle and were able to distill the main pain points that needed to be addressed.
User Testing Design Implementation
Since the handoff deadline was projected to be a month after our usertesting. We brought on another junior designer to help with executing solutions from the insights we gathered. I was able to parse through what could be done in current visual states versus the interaction models that needed to be looked at. This process took 2 sprint cycles before we finally were able to get buy-in from our Product Owners and final approved comps.
Expedited Hand-off
It was all hands on deck to get these final designs out. There was no way only one designer could get our designs and annotations off in the 1 week timeline we had. I devised a phased plan for the team to get 80% of our work into Figma and the rest of the handoff from Sketch by utilizing the beauty of Zeplin. Teamwork made the dream work and we made our deadline!
Q2: 2022_NOW
06
impact
Going back to our needs list these were the results of project at this point:
Users: Customers timeline in person estimated 6-8 hours in the dealership
Dealers: Initial dealer processing time 10-12 hours
Toyota: Success metrics are mostly focused on dealer adoption at this point with the goal of accruing more than 100 dealership partnerships by MVP launch
07
future state
1) Platform migration
Sketch/Invision/Zeplin to Figma/Figjam
Multiple dev partners down to couple and AEM CMS
Applying new brand refresh with Design System components
2) Roadmap Strategic Objective
Holistic shopping experience
Visibility on a broader scale
Working on adding service features
User testing found that we cut that initial process down to an estimate 2 hours
We have found that dealers have also cut down the processing time to approximately 4 hours
With the beta testing and internal Toyota business marketing we have increased dealer adoption to 250+ with projection to double with an upcoming Toyota Dealer Expo