Cartakeover.ca
Web application to help user to get / takeover their car lease in Canada.
Visual Design Lead
UI/UX
User Research
Front end Development
Branding
Jason Chong
Chris Lu
Figma
Sketch
Photoshop
Illustrator
HTML/CSS
Wordpress
Mailchimp
15 weeks
Problem
Users want to get out of their car lease because of various reasons. Theres happens to be a need for a simple free platform for users to post their cars onto the platform. Users are not experienced to know the journey of car lease take over.
Product
Web based application that collects user's car lease data and allows users to browse through different cars.
User base
Car lease owners, user group who interested for short term car lease, user group who interested in getting a car, user group who wants to get out of their car lease, users who want to see market lease price for cars.
Research
What do people look for in a car lease?
To help me understand what users are looking for in a car lease, and what factors influence their decisions, I’ve did some competitors analysis on different car platforms like leasebusters.com, autotrader.ca, leasecoasts.ca, takemyleaseover.ca. I’ve also arranged face-to-face meetings and zoom calls to watch the testers using their website. I gave them assignments and asked them to think aloud when performing different tasks. I’ve also ask them different elements they are looking for in terms of leasing a car or financing a car.
Results
- Some of the subject did not know exactly what is car lease and the process when browsing the competitors’ site
- The subjects have not understood some of the terms of car lease such as “Cash Incentive”
- The subjects don’t know what are the benefits of taking over people’ car lease
- The subjects like the facts that they can see what others are paying for in their car lease
- The subjects have a trouble navigating the website’s menu
- The test subjects looked at other subpages “About Us” to find out more about car lease but cannot find answers
- The subjects don’t like the fact they need to pay to post their car up on the platform
So how might we communicate the process of car lease takeover in a more understandable way and how might we promote the user to takeover other people’ car lease? We should be clear and tell the user the benefits of taking over others’ car lease and provide materials to help them in the journey of getting their car lease transfer.
Another point to addressed is that most competitors’ platform are not responsive in their platform, users are having trouble filtering out the cars that they want to look at when navigating through the platform. It is important to not have it build on desktop but mobile as well.
Possible solutions to help users in their process of understanding car lease transfer and their journey would be:
- Be transparent on how the process works, don’t let them think the process is hard
- Provide some sort of a checklist to know what they need when transferring a car
- Let users know why people are transferring their car
- Tell them the benefits/advantages of taking over ones car lease
- Easy to interact on mobile
- Highlight only car lease details that matters to users
Process Overview
Chris + Me on the same page
This is like an overview of how the platform would look. I’ve built a simple architecture of the wireframe based on the findings we found from the research. This was useful to communicate in the team and to have everyone on the same page.
Key Findings
Too many icons and search fields
Following with the initial prototype, we invited some of the guests back to do some testings. The users are feeling distracted with a lot of the icons, and search fields when interacting on phone. We also realized that users don’t want to put too much efforts when filling out the search fields, mainly because they don’t have a specific car they want to look at. Which is much different than buying a second hand car, or new car because the range of products are much smaller scale.
It’s really good that we found out these finding before building the product and I quickly made some changes to the design.
Adjustments
After the usability testing with the users, I reiterate and explore different ways to tackle this problem. I understand more about the users’ needs and wants when they interact on this platform.
- Took away the search bar in the mobile menu and replaced with pre-defined search results button
- More clean and simple when browsing
- Moved the filter onto search results page instead on the home page for users that wants a detail search
- Two main actions treated as two big button on home screen, so user can get to the right information at beginning
Feedbacks
I ran another in person testing, recording their behaviours and did some assessment on if they are happy with the solutions and process. 9 out of 10 users are happy with the predefined search while one user are frustrate with not being able to filter everything at beginning.
Another Key Adjustment
I also added a fixed menu and filter at the bottom of the screen, since there are only few goals for the user to perform on this platform. Most platforms have their filter at the top of the screen when the page load, and It’s taking too much efforts for users to scroll down every time when they go to the next page.
User wants
Giving the users what matter to them
We included some of the helpful guidelines and tools for the users. At the beginning, when user upload pictures of their car, some of the pictures are in portrait mode, and the angles aren’t clear. This tends to lead potential customer ask seller more questions where most picture could answer.
It’s a constrain for us to maybe have like an AI to allows only high quality image to be upload on to the platform, and we see this problem on a-lot other user platforms. Mainly because it’s too much efforts to bring your car to take a picture especially you want to get rid of it.
However, we want to try our best to solve this and have the platform as consistent as possible and we came up with two solutions:
- Have a library of all car images in png, to make the platform consistent.
- Tell user why is it important to take better pictures
Solution 1 would be the best ideal solutions, however it’s taking too much efforts, and it would be too time consuming where theres new cars every year. So we went with Solution 2, and we provides guides and filter when they are posting their cars on to the site. We also create a separate page on different car photo techniques when taking pictures. Other than that, we felt like in the future we can also link this page to car photographers to help their car takes pictures.
In order to help user to understand more about lease transfer and guide them through the process. I created few content pages that talk about lease transfer in both buyer and seller perspectives. I also create a sample agreement that users can use when transferring a lease and what to look out for.
Visual Guide
Ensuring cohesive design
I created a simple style guide to help with maintaining consistency throughout the design.
Conclusion
The results were....
The results turns out better than we expected. We’ve never really imagined people would use our platform because we didn’t ran any sorts of ads. Our page is also in the first page in Google Ranking. We did some sort of promotions by tagging other car dealers on Instagram but that was it. We also get about 450 unique users every month!!!
✅ Next Step
To scale this product, we need to align more in the business perspectives. Currently, it only gets profits from ads, but we can also add fees towards the user if they want to have their car post on the first page (like an advertising fee), or we can provide services to lease transfer their cars. These are some of the ideas we can definitely explore in the future for this project.
🤔Could've done better
It would be better if we make the user journey better when achieving the seller's contact information. For example, we can capture their personal info, before revealing the information. Just so we can do target marketing on them afterwards. Also if the website were to expand, it doesn't hurt to have more users info.
👍 I've learned...
I realized that even a platform seems simple in the front end, but there are lots of thoughts put behind it. An interaction on desktop is very different than interacting on mobile. And also Users never do what you want them to do!
