How we use the power of design to drive conversion (part 1)
At heycar we believe that great design can deliver a huge impact and can help us as a company help users find their perfect car. That is why value taking chances and testing ideas on one of the most important parts of our website — the Product Detail Page (PDP).
This PDP provides users with all the relevant information and technical details about a specific car, empowering them to make an informed decision before reaching out to the dealer. In other words, the PDP is where users make the decision whether this car is what they’re looking for.
We knew from previous user research that our PDP performs well but we are never content: there is always room to improve. We continuously seek new ways of doing things better and one thing we can be confident about is that since heycar is just a little over one-year-old, there is a lot to learn and to improve on the product side.
Our team strongly believe that:
“Good enough isn’t good enough, if it can be better. And better isn’t good enough if it can be the best.”
Design Sprint Preparation
We decided to set up a 4-day sprint and included stakeholders from all different departments (Engineering, Product, Marketing, etc). The aim of this sprint was to find out what pain points our users experienced during the decision-making process on our PDP and to come up with solutions that help resolve these pain points for our users
During the day one we focused on a stage we called “emphasize and define”. In this stage, we learned about our users and built point-of-views based on their needs. One day two, we focused on initial ideation sessions for small components.
Day 3 and 4 were designed pure design days, without any other stakeholders. We set up a 4-headed design team to come up with four individual page redesigns based on our learnings and new findings.
To end the sprint the design team got together with the rest of the team to elicit feedback and work out the respective advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solutions.
Day 1
We kicked off the day with a short introduction of what we want to achieve with the time and followed this by walking through background information from previous user research to get everyone on the same page.
After carrying out planned activities, such as highlighting user pain points, affinity mapping and creating user journeys, we listed all insights on post-it notes to separate them into 3 parts:
- What do we know? Facts that came from user research, data and previous usability tests
- What do we assume? Assumed but unvalidated problems our users have
- What do we want to know? Things that we would love to understand more in order to question its importance for the PDP.
At the end of the day, we turned the clusters into how-might-we-goals and came up with a user point of view — the goal of the sprint.
Day 2
On day two we were ready for initial ideation! We kicked-off the day by going over the research from day one and also reminded everyone of the goals we want to achieve.
Knowing that we needed to create many ideas later that day, we took some time to get some inspiration from different kind of sources either by checking out our favorite websites, analyzing the competition or going over our user research again.
After that, we were ready for ideating, and since our PDP has a lot of components, it was very important to do a lot of “crazy 8s” ideation sessions for these components, focusing on, for instance, the lead funnel or what should be shown in the first viewport.
Day 3 & 4
With our minds full of learnings and new ideas, it was time for every designer to sit down individually and start re-designing the PDP to bring all the ideas together into a cohesive bigger picture.
We organized two feedback meetings to get individual input for each designer from everyone involved and used the last day to present all our work together and to agree on next steps.
At this point, we gathered many new design solutions across devices, such as new ways of displaying car picture galleries, new layouts for the first viewport, new sticky elements, dealer maps or new calls-to-action (CTA). At this stage, usability testing became essential to explore and get insights on our ideas.
Lead Funnel
One of the ideas that came out of the workshop was reducing the amount of lead-generation-CTAs from two to one, which we tested right away on production. Despite the additional work of redesigning the whole lead funnel, it worth it: the unique conversion ratio increased by 10%.
Testing Phase and final decisions
After the sprint, we evaluated many more of these ideas together with 5 potential users who are in the middle of a car buying process and gathered many more insights.
Based on our findings we are planning to come up with two new full versions of the heycar PDP and will test them against the live website.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where we go through the new PDP elements and how they helped increase our conversion rate and ultimately help more users find their perfect car.
We are currently looking for an amazing UX/UI Designer to join our team in Berlin. Sounds interesting? You can learn more and apply here, or checkout our careers page:
