Prototyping through the pandemic
Last month marked my one year anniversary at Auto Trader. It seems like a lifetime ago when I was onboarding remotely and meeting my new team via video calls from my dining room - although this has pretty much become the norm for many digital companies up and down the country. “You’re on mute”, “Can you see my slides?” and giving a wave 👋 at the end of those meetings are all now ingrained in our working week.
I was excited to join the design team but this wasn’t your typical onboarding, even through the uncertainty my first few weeks at Auto Trader were a pleasant experience. My work equipment arrived a few days before my start date and John from ‘Connect’ was on hand to get me up and running.
I then met my onboarding buddy Matt, he took me through our systems and team structure and answered the many questions I had. With our video technology I managed to setup a lot of intros with people across our tribe. Our weekly design catchups and crits moved online and through remote whiteboarding tools such as Miro we were able to stay productive and connected as a team.
Great start
Auto Trader ensures all employees get off to a ‘Great start’ and offers a number of onboarding activities and training sessions. They really value your wellbeing and give you the time and support to learn more about the company and settle into your role.
One thing that was apparent was the people and culture. There’s so much to explore outside of my role and opportunities to join and support the different networks and guilds doing great work within Auto Trader and throughout our local communities.
Also not to forget the ‘Greenman’. I’m sworn to secrecy not to reveal the details and wouldn’t want to spoil the experience for anyone joining Auto Trader. All I can say is, it was an insightful couple of days and I got to learn a lot about myself and had the opportunity to meet a lot of new faces, who too were starting their Auto Trader journey.
Fast forward
I’m now part of the newly formed ‘Product Engineering’ tribe at Auto Trader, aligned with designers, developers, data analysts and product teams. Over the past few months we’ve been meeting in the office on rota days and it’s been nice seeing people face to face. Lots of people are taller than expected! Our first in-person design day since the pandemic was a great way for new members of the team to socialise, it also gave me the chance to put my bowling skills to the test, which I’m now champion until our next outing.
Prototyping
At Auto Trader we use Figma to prototype and build our designs. This helps us collaborate as a team and house our design system components. Figma has advanced rapidly and the addition of updates such as auto layout, variants and interactive components makes it such a powerful tool to aid your design process and documentation.
Figma also allows you to share interactive prototypes with stakeholders and online usability testing tools such as UserZoom. This has been an integral part of our research and testing process over the past year due to the pandemic and not having the ability to run in-person studies.
During my time here I’ve created prototypes to different levels of fidelity. I find it impactful at the early stage of project ideation to sketch ideas and encourage stakeholders to take part in the process. Everyone loves a crazy 8’s session!
It’s always nice to reflect and see how your designs and thinking have evolved over numerous tweaks and iterations, documenting feedback and validating hypotheses along the way.
I’ve found stakeholders at different levels can understand prototype fidelity in different ways. This is where storytelling helps explain rationale and give clear context to reasoning and decision making.
Back to the office
Our Manchester office has undergone a refurb during its closure and is now a vibrant setting for collaboration and hybrid working. We have labs and breakout spaces and as designers we couldn’t wait to start sketching on walls and grabbing those post its! Yes, we still have the famous cars and campervans (which you can meet in, social distancing of course!).
Recently we’ve kicked off our ‘design studios’, this has been valuable to work alongside content, research and design again, breaking out to discuss projects. Something we’ve definitely missed in our remote setting. Plus we have some talented bakers in the team and I’m always on the lookout for the food alerts in our slack channel, these treats are not to be missed!
My commitments
At Auto Trader each quarter we set commitments to work towards, whether that be short or long-term goals. This gives me the opportunity to set targets which are project specific as well as exploring areas where I can improve skills or offer support to our networks or outside communities through our volunteering days.
One area I’ve committed to is running my first design club. Through Auto Trader I’ve signed up to the STEM Ambassador programme and I’m currently offering design clubs to local schools in Manchester. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while since I took my son to his first code club and found a lack of design led activities for younger children. I’m hoping through these clubs I can teach children about the design thinking process and potentially inspire some future digital designers.
Project focus
Since joining Auto Trader I’ve been working with our product and development teams on our new online finance proposition. As part of our strategy to offer a fully online car buying experience we need to allow consumers the ability to apply for finance on our website and mobile apps.
Working with content and brand we’ve been trying to innovate and push thinking in this space. How can we instil emotion during a finance experience which is often quite confusing and jargon-heavy? We’ve been keen to ensure we’re setting and meeting user expectations and going above and beyond adding subtle moments of delight without impacting the core experience.
Through continuous testing and iteration we’ve been building a simple journey which offers guidance and reassurance. The feedback has been very positive so far and we’re excited to launch a beta release later this month.
Purple Tuesday
Earlier this month we celebrated Purple Tuesday at Auto Trader. Purple Tuesday is an annual event that showcases and celebrates the value of customers with disabilities and neurodiverse conditions.
Every year, businesses are encouraged to make a commitment towards improving their customer experience so that their websites, stores and business ventures are accessible to everyone.
To celebrate Purple Tuesday we ran a number of activities to raise awareness and promote the great work being done across the business. We asked people to wear purple and the design team got together to watch an online accessibility webinar. We created a number of posters to highlight some of the challenges people face and held a talk which outlined the day and promoted internal workshops that we’ll be running for employees as an introduction to accessibility.
Being accessibility champions
I’ve always been passionate about accessibility and learning more about designing inclusive experiences. I’ve often educated on best practice and audited journeys during my career. Since my time at Auto Trader I’ve had the opportunity to join our Accessibility Working Group. This has given me the chance to champion accessibility - even sometimes evangelising, working towards helping raise awareness and build on the culture and processes within the business.
Small steps lead to big changes
As a working group we know we can’t solve accessibility at Auto Trader in a day, a week or even a year. We have a number of products and platforms serving both consumers and retailers, with plenty of opportunity for improvement. Accessibility isn’t about running a few reports and fixing colours or sections of code. It’s about creating a culture where accessibility is embedded at the beginning of the product cycle, in that first kick-off session.
We’ve set out our commitments for the next 12 months and I’m looking forward to helping run workshops and supporting the group as we start delivering our objectives.
What’s next?
After an exciting 12 months the challenges continue as we look to merge our online products into a single online car buying experience. Supporting our consumers, allowing them to complete different parts of their journey online, whether that be reserving, part exchanging their car or getting a finance quote. We appreciate the complexity and decision making involved and need to build a journey which allows consumers to jump in and out of the journey. We’ve built and released in stages, learning and optimising these individual funnels. Over the coming months we have more understanding and testing to do and there’s a real buzz amongst the teams as we tackle design challenges and build the next phase of our digital retailing vision.
Want to get involved?
If you’d like to join Auto Trader and be a part of building our next generation of online car buying products, visit our careers page for more details.
