1. Intro
2. Problem
3. Process
4. Design
KAR Global - Adesa

Revving up bids

Scroll to see the project
Scroll to see the project
Scroll to see the project
Scroll to see the project

Intro

The Company

ADESA is an online platform that provides wholesale vehicle auction solutions to authorized dealers.

Dealerblock is a specific inventory category on ADESA that is open to all dealers. The inventory consists of off-lease vehicles that were not sold at private auction to franchise dealers.

5,000+
average daily users in Canada & USA
10,000+
Vehicles available for auction/week
4,000+
bidding actions taken daily

The Task

Redesign the Bidding pages for ADESA Dealerblock to have a more modern look and feel and match the experience of other parts of the site. Identify opportunities to improve the Bidding experience.

Project goals

Reduce time to place bid
Remove as much friction from the bidding process so that users can quickly submit a bid on a vehicle
Transparent pricing & Fees
Find a way to be more transparent with pricing and fees so that a user understand the total amount they will pay for a vehicle
Refresh & Modernize look
Redesign the bidding page to look modern and align with the rest of site's look and feel

The Problem

How might we reduce the friction of bidding on Adesa.com, to help customers place faster and more confident bids.

Process

Alignment & Requirements Gathering

This project involved multiple stakeholders across major branches of the business. Before diving into the project I held a kick off meeting where I led an assumption mapping workshop to align all the stakeholders on the expected outcomes for the project.

Methods & Outcomes

  • Assumption mapping
  • Priority Matrix
  • Definitition Document

Research

To kick off the project I worked with the lead product owner to organize and conduct a series of interviews with 5 of our customers. We pooled buyers from 5 different dealerships with varying levels of seniority; from a few months in the role to 10+ years.

We asked them to walk us through their typical workflow when bidding on vehicles, to get a better understanding of how they navigated the bidding pages and identify points of friction that would help us narrow in on what should solve.

Insights

After the interviews I worked with stakeholders to look at the information we had gathered to identify the paint points that emerged and collaboratively prioritize which points we should solve for that would have the most impact.

Based on the patterns we saw and anecdotal evidence gathered from the product owners and other customer facing teams, we determined there were 3 core problems we wanted to solve for.

Repetitive manual input
Each time a user placed a bid they were required to select the dealership they were bidding under, enter a bid amount, and select the services and payment options they were checking out with.
Slow bid process
A symptom of the manual input pain point was the slowing down of the entire bid process due to input errors and the amount of information we were asking them to provide.
Unclear pricing & Fees
Added fees and services would leave a user confused and frustrated that their total was different from their initial bid which they would only find out about once their bid was confirmed.

Design

Modernized Design

One of the goals for the project was to update the design of the bidding pages on Adesa.com. The organization had recently refreshed its Design System and was undergoing a site wide refresh to implement the updated styles and components. It was my responsibility to leverage the updates from the design system to give these pages a modern look and feel. The image below shows the before and after results of the refresh.

Before
After

Faster Bidding

One of the major pain points that was identified when speaking with our customers was that they had to manually enter their information each time they placed a bid. This slowed down the process significantly and also caused frustrating errors when users entered the wrong information or selected the wrong.

I solved for this pain point in the following ways:

1. Bid Details

- Automatically populate dealership user account is logged in under
- Pre-populate the max bid amount based on the last bid entered into the system
- created a component that allowed user to quickly increase bid by 100 dollar increments

2. Default checkout settings

- Leverage stored information from customer on-boarding to define default check out settings if and when user wins a bid.
‍

Transparent pricing

Another pain point we felt was important to solve for was the lack of transparency when it came to fees and pricing.