Role & Responsibilities
Role on Project
Experience Designer working with 2-3 person UX team and reporting to Lead Experience Designer and Group Experience Director.
Individual contribution primarily focused on prototype creation around interaction heavy pages (finance calculator, vehicle detail page) for user testing.
Timeline
2 years
Agency
Razorfish
Team Size
6 designers
Challenges
Site hadn’t been updated since 2008
Stiff and rapidly growing competition from start-ups, OEMs, and other used car sellers
Goal
Update their 8-year old website and integrate it with the full customer purchase process, both in-store and at-home.
Skills Used
High-fidelity Axure Prototyping
Competitive Assessment
Vehicle Detail Page Demo (Created for client kickoff as the concept starting point for displaying vehicle details):
http://io5qoz.axshare.com/#p=ipad_frame (PW: tablet123)
Mobile Prototype:
http://yw7v01.axshare.com/browse_12.html (PW: 1234)
View All Wires Here:
http://ejvvbm.axshare.com (PW: 1234)
Header Concepts
The UX team worked closely with design in creating multiple homepage concepts/variations so we could better test overall structure, content, and look-and-feel before going into detailed design.
Browse
Designing the browse page required a number of considerations due to CarMax's complex business requirements that would influence the availability/options associated with each vehicle.
Variables included:
Distance of vehicle to nearest store
Condition of vehicle
Transferability
New vs. used car
Saved status
This resulted in having to account for a large number of variations in wires/comps in order to properly cover all bases.
Default Browse View
Compare
By laying out vehicles in a horizontal compare matrix, users can compare characteristics and features across the screen, with the option of viewing all specifications if desired.
Because it is important for users to be able to compare vehicles that interest them, the compare functionality was a piece that required a rethink. Rather than listing every specification about each vehicle, we opted to surface "key" elements of each vehicle. This reduced clutter, and made the page less overwhelming to review.
Compare View