Favorite Vehicles
“Skills Applied
Interaction Design, Wireframe Creation, Interactive Prototypes, Test Plan Creation, Usability Test Moderation, Iterative Design”
Challenge
The ability to save cars for research purposes while building a consideration set is a must need for online car shopping. Favorites, a new feature on Cars.com, fulfills this need by giving car shoppers the ability to save and compare cars from any computer or mobile device. I picked up work on Favorites after the initial ideation and concepting phases.
Process
When I took over responsibility for Favorites, many of the interactions were yet to be defined for both the wired site as well as for mobile. I finalized the interactions and annotated wireframes for visual designers and developers to begin building. Along with the product manager, I defined what the MVP for the first release would involve as well as enhancements for future iterations.
Annotated wireframes for wired and mobile
I next went into the lab to test our designs with a representative sample of our users to see if interactions were intuitive and to discover any usability issues. With help from my UX research team member, I created the test plan and carried out moderation of the tests.
“Whiteboard notes for wired session.”
After testing, I analyzed notes and developed a test report to share out to the company.
“Findings from the usability test helped us understand what worked well and identify where users had issues.”
On wired, all participants understood how to add and remove cars as well as compare cars. There was some confusion on the search results page over the use of language for Favorites versus Saved Cars and Saved Searches links. We responded to this feedback by adding a label to the links to make it clearer that they are related. Additionally, we saw some findability issues with some participants having difficulties finding their saved content immediately after saving.
On mobile, we saw similar issues of participants having difficulties finding their saved content. We are currently exploring ways to improve findability of saved content on both wired and mobile.
Another issue that was uncovered on mobile, that was not a focus of the test, was that the initial inventory search widget was often overlooked and participants instead tapped into another section of the site. This finding was unexpected and was making it difficult for users to get into an inventory search in a more direct way. We are currently exploring ways to make it easier for users to get into a search result that is easy and more relevant to them.