Jon Hensley

Challenge

Comparing cars side-by-side is an important part of a car shopper's process, ranked one of the top-three reasons users rate Cars.com most useful over competitors. However, the Cars.com comparison experience had been neglected for many years and had many usability and efficiency issues, in addition to being out of date with the current site styles.

Process

I began with an evaluation of our current comparison experience to discover what was working well in addition to its shortcomings. I also looked at the comparison experiences of our competitors, car manufacturers, and experiences outside of the car space, such as eCommerce sites. Additionally, I pulled data from two auto studies to support findings from the comparison evaluations. From these exercises, I developed a set of best practices to follow while developing and sketching ideas.

Once I had worked out ideas through sketching, I jumped into Axure and built an interactive prototype to test out ideas with users. I completed a test script and moderated all participants in the tests.

First iteration prototype | First iteration test script | First iteration test findings

Findings from the test fed iterations of a second round prototype.

Reflection

Shortly after this work, the company went through a reorganization and priorities where shifted, putting off implementing the compare redesign. Before we could get back to it, I left the company. However, Cars.com has since implemented the feature which includes much of my work and research, albeit with an updated visual design.