Illustration Courtesy- Neda Ivanova

Conducting UX research on a Cars24 internal product

It is the first part of multiple part series of the work I did for the Cars24 Internal App.

Cars24 is the leading second-hand car buy and sell business in India. As of today, Cars24 stands at a valuation of $3.3 Billion. You can sell your old car and also buy a new second-hand car on Cars24 with amazing discount offers.

Understanding more about the Seller side, we have the following sections in the funnel.
1. Top of the funnel (TOFu)- Getting users to appointment
2. Appointment to Inspection (A2I)- Getting the inspection of the car done
3. Inspection to Procurement (I2P)- Involves negotiation and procurement

I worked majorly on the Inspection end. Once Cars24 receives a request for inspection, the inspection is allocated to a CJ (Car Jockey) or a car inspector. If the request is for a Home Inspection, the car inspector locates the home of the Customer and then conducts the inspection. Based on the inspection report, a price is quoted to the Customer and from there the negotiation takes place.

The product we had was an Android App which was installed on the mobile phones of the CJs (or Car Inspectors). The App helps in filling the observation of the Inspection. This further helps in evaluating the value of the car.

A look at the App before the re-design

Experiencing the experience

To understand this complete process, what would be better than trying to sell your own car?

I booked an appointment for selling my car on the Cars24 App and got my booking done. Made a flowchart out of the entire process and marked the means of the process as ‘In App’, ‘SMS’, ‘Physical’, ‘Call’ and ‘Whatsapp’

Once I went through this process, I understood the story of the customer end. But since the product I was supposed to work upon was the App which is used by the CJs. In order to do this, I used the following techniques.

1. Going out with CJs on a real-time inspection and observing how they work. (Guerrilla Technique of UX Research or Fly on the wall).
2. Trying to conduct an inspection on my own, using the App and finding UX issues with the App. (Role Play and Heuristic Evaluation).
3. Interviewing a set of users face to face to understand more about them and their interaction with the App (Focus Group Interview).
4. Running a survey on a larger user base to take up Qualitative insight (Survey Research).
5. Quantifying present experience of the CJs using system usability score (SUS) and NPS.

1. Going out with CJs

A few things I kept in mind while doing this activity.

1. Did not let the CJ (Inspection guy) know that I am going to design their product. Showed me just as an intern.
2. Noted down the doubts on the go but didn’t affect their activity.
3. Observed the customer while the inspection was in progress.
4. Observed how the CJ interacted with the App and saw the touchpoints.
5. Asked the relevant questions from the CJ and the customer once the entire process was done.

Coming back home I talked to the Business, Product and Customer Experience Team to understand what are the major problems they have identified now.

2. Role Play and Heuristic Evaluation

After going out with different CJs for some time, I tried to complete one inspection on my own using the App. This way I understood how is the actual User Experience of the App

A few things I kept in mind while conducting this activity were.

1. Test out all the aspects of the App
2. Try to find out what things were guided to me in the App
3. Not let my personal bias come into the play
4. Checking if all the Heuristic Evaluations points are being taken care of in the Product or not.

3. Interviewing CJs Face to Face

Once I had got the gist of the inspection as a whole, I made a focus group of different CJs. The group included the different CJs based on

1. Location of working
2. Age
3. Number of years associated with Cars24
4. Home Inspection or Branch Inspection

The questions asked were based on

1. Their experience of working with Cars24 as a CJ
2. The Pain Points they experience day to day
3. What are their motivations for working
4. How do they conduct an inspection
5. What is their everyday routine

4. Survey Research

Based on the insights we received in the focus group interviews, role play and guerilla technique, we jotted down the major issues. Now was the time to validate some of those and also find some new issues that we can from the masses. We prepared a set of questions in form of a google form and rolled it out to our fleet of CJs. The questionnaire was filled out by the 385 respondents. The questions were

1. What are the top problems that you face as a CJ? (Aap ko as a CJ kaam karne mein kya badi dikkate aati hai?)
2. In which section do you face most of the problems in the inspection app? (Aapko sabse jyada dikkat konsa section bharne me lagta hai? )
3. Brief the problem that you face in that section? (Uss section me aapko kya dikkat aati hai?)
4. Do you mark the information in the App while doing the inspection or do you first do the physical inspection and then mark the information in App directly in one go? (Aap inspection ke waqt saath saath app mein mark karte hai ya inspection karne ke baad seedha ek baar mein app mein mark karte hai?)
5. Have you ever experienced that some information that you fill vanishes from the app after being filled? (Kya aapne kabhi aisa dekha hai ki jo information aap inspection ke waqt app mein bharte hai, wo apne aap gayab ho jaata ho?)

5. SUS and NPS form

Along with taking qualitative data from the users, some Quantitative data is also important because in the end numbers speak larger stories in lesser words. For the Quantitative Analysis of this particular project, SUS (System Usability Score) and NPS (Net Promoter Score) were chosen. A few other internal data points like TAT of inspection, Slot Adherence Time and Nogo percentage were also kept into consideration. The reasons for choosing these metrics were

1. SUS provides a good understanding of how usable the product is in the present form and helps in comparing after the redesign
2. NPS provides the experience of the users as a whole, other than the experience in the product.
3. Other metrics like TAT, SAT and NoGo percentage were important from the business perspective.

Insights

After collecting the information from various sources or diverging in our research, now was the time to converge in the research.

First of all, I understood the CJs stakeholders. You can find the Stakeholder Map below

After talking to many CJs and going out on inspection with them, we created a persona of a generic CJ.

To understand their experience in this entire process, we went ahead with the User Journey Mapping.

From the survey we conducted, we got the following results.

Word Cloud

After a rigorous analysis of all the insights, I got the gist of all the issues. But the problem was how to segregate them into different sections. Putting the issues into the bucket was one of the solutions which were used. The larger buckets which got sight of were as follows.

For understanding more thing on the upper layer design, I used the App first-hand to point out the major issues and marked those.

Conclusion of the Research

We got hold of the major issues of the App in terms of the UX as well as the UI. We divided the things in our Road map and started further scrutinising the problems and ideating about them.

The team consisted of

Support and Supervision
Pushpendra Sharma- Product Manager
Alok Edasseri- Senior Product Designer
Harshit Sinha- Design Head

Groundwork, ideation and documentation
Vaibhav Verma- Product Designer

I hope you found the article helpful. Want to hit a conversation? Drop a mail at vaibhavverma2752@gmail.com.

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