DealerON

DealerOn, Inc. develops websites and offers interactive auto industry marketing solutions. The company provides online marketing services and search engine services to the retail automotive industry. It offers SEO accelerator, search engine optimization, search engine marketing solution, display advertising, pay-per-click solution, remarketing, Facebook advertising, and YouTube advertising solutions.

Leads Management System + Reporting = Beacon

Lead Management System( LMS)

The Challenge

As a dealer, internet marketing representative, and internal CMS user, DealerOn wanted to identify dealerships’ phone leads - being able to see phone calls made to the dealership (may include multiple departments). Lead ID, Time the call was placed, incoming source, Email. Capturing the data as a lead, allows marketing managers, sales teams, and internal Dealoron employees to accurately track individual lead types and enables anyone to respond to potential customers.

Notes:

Maybe a good idea to allow a user (in the future) to input the response date/time after ranking the lead based on whether it is qualified or not. Aids in time management and increasing revenue (department-based - sales revenue, service, parts, etc.)

User Interviews:

To gain a deep understanding of our users' pain points, I took the initiative to conduct a series of insightful user interviews.

• Determined the frequency of engagements necessary before they are captured.

• Established whether engagements are tracked via IP addresses or user registrations on websites.

• Developed a clear and effective process for verifying leads.

• Identified the origins of leads, detailing their creation and direction.

• Defined Routings, clarified how OEM and SEM are noticed, established routing rules, and explained the concept of a Lead ID.

• Outlined steps to address and correct the placement of incorrect leads, ensuring a streamlined process.

Dealeron’s Lead Destination Platform

What the users were saying:

Leeds Management System Lo-Fidelity Wireframe

Based on the research I needed a representation of the ideas. This helped give a visual representation and a clear understanding of the functionalities and designs that the Lead Management System needed to support. Went back and forth collaborating with Dealeron internal users, developers, OEM, CMS (Customer Management System), and Product managers.

High Fidelity

After a constant back and forth with the product team I needed to capture the look and feel of the LMS in the advanced stages of the design process. The product manager, developer, and I went beyond the placeholders and ‘lorem Ipsum text of low-fidelity wireframes to include actual content, typefaces, colors, dimensions, padding, and branding elements.

Phase 2

Final Prototype

With clear feedback from the product manager and clients, I was able to deliver an effective product. In this process I learned communicating with clients, product managers, developers, and stakeholders helped reveal how a product will look upon completion. This made it easier for a product’s overall design and UX.

One thing I’ve learned is everything has a connection. When working on one product or service a UX designer has to keep in mind how it affects other products within the products ecosystem. This product affected the DealerOns Reporting system called Beacon.

In the beginning process of this, I didn’t understand where LMS lived. Through a partnership with the Product Manager, I found out that the Leads Management system lived separately from Reporting. These two products were communicating with each other by sharing information. After speaking with stakeholders, the Product Manager, and the UX team we all decided that LMS and CMS had to be one. Thus, the redesign of the customer Management System (CMS) known as Beacon.

The Ask: DealerOn prides itself in managing dealerships’ broad ecosystem of Websites. Your large dealerships, like Mercedes, Chevy, Ford, and Volkswagon owned multiple dealerships and thus have multiple websites. So how do you track the performance and health of dealerships across the nation? What application was available, If not can we build a product where reporting, a leads overview, track performance of Advertisement. Also, can we download excel sheets to pass around?

Overall I needed a page that summarises, the averages, and generates the median values of KPIs for dealer groups, and sets of dealerships.

Problem: Users are unable to view rollup metrics for Dealer Group sites or Agencies to understand the total performance of their dealerships.

Users:

• Dealer Groups

• Agencies

• Sales

• Customer Service

Interviews.

Wireframe by paper

Balsamiq wire-framing helps convert those paper wireframe into low fidelity wireframes. Allowed me to share users flow with clients, Product manager, developers and other UX team members. By doing this I was able to address my biases, address opportunities that was missed and improve UI. It also allowed me to develop missing design elements like icons, buttons, and illustrations by using Adobe Illustrator.

How it all started:

Iteration 1:

• Allow users to search by Dealers or Agency

• Select Dealer

• Select OEM And Region

• Capability to Export Files

Iterations 2:

Reporting needed a way to improve site navigation. The users needed breadcrumbs to make it easier for users to navigate a website. I wanted to encourage users to browse other sections of the site. Also made it easy to backtrack to a previous page.

Final Iteration:

User Testing:

Finding out if users are able to complete the tasks at hand successfully without any issues

1. The amount of time it takes to complete specific tasks

2. Identifying user satisfaction scale

3. Discovering changes to improve user performance and enjoyment

4. Test the performance to see if it meets your usability goals

The Challenge: DealerOn had no user testing process. The team and I had to request tools so we could validate our design.

And then there was Maze.com