Valuation Tools Responsive Redesign
The collector car Valuation Tools project was a responsive redesign of an existing multi-tool desktop web application including vehicle search and filter, value history module and collector car portfolio - also known as My Favorites - along with the design and integration of two new tools: classifieds and comparable sales.
Year: 2015-2016
Tasks: UX/UI, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Stakeholder Relations
Tools: Axure, Photoshop, Focus Groups
Collaborations: Business Unit Stakeholders, Creative Director, Usability Manager, Project Manager, Lead Developer, Copywriters
Product Goals
Hagerty's Classic Car Valuation Tools exists to provide users with historical valuation data and trend to determine a vehicles' current value and/or estimate its investment growth potential. The business benefits by driving insurance quotes from the individual vehicle configuration pages.
Discovery
The first step was to spend ample time familiarizing myself with the existing functionality of the valuation tools to get a solid grasp of the vehicle specification and valuation data structure. Many conversations with business unit stakeholders and backend developers were had as it was imperative that I fully understood what the options and limitations were when it came to designing data displays.
Concurrently, the project manager was sectioning this large-scale project into more manageable modules and developing a scope for each. Team kickoff meetings were held for each module to define functional requirements, system constraints and resource limitations before heading into the wireframing phase.
Vehicle Search
Though the vehicle dashboard pages had a high organic search ranking and were some of the most trafficked entry pages on the hagerty.com domain, we still needed to provide users with a good vehicle search experience for those that entered into - or found themselves on - the Valuation Tools homepage.
The original search flow was extremely outdated using drop select fields for the vehicle specification inputs, so any improvement was going to be a win:
Pick lists were picking up speed as a UI trend at the time, and it was a perfect solution for the new vehicle search. I initially wireframed the pick list with expand/collapse alpha dividers to minimize scroll need...
However, user testing exposed an unforeseen issue: Users were tapping the divider bars while scrolling on mobile and tablet, so we eliminated the expand/collapse functionality to expose all selection options in production. In hindsight, there were other benefits to this open format including minimizing clicks and forcing the exposure of vehicle configuration options that users may have not been previously aware of.
Vehicle Dashboard
The Vehicle Dashboard pages are the hub of the Valuation Tools app serving to provide detailed vehicle model information as well as teaser data for historical values, recent classifieds, comparable sales modules and, of course, a strong CTA to an insurance quote in a priority location.
Business and SEO requirements for lengthy content influenced the long page stacked approach, so the inclusion of "Scroll" icons were added beneath each section to indicate more content existed below.
Vehicle Value History
Business and functional requirements for the value history module included:
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Display vehicle values by condition, supporting multiple vehicles over specified time ranges
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Offer the valuation data in both graph and table format
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Add visual prominence to the the value adjustment content
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Allow for the addition of financial indices to the value history graph for comparison
The requirements were first applied to wireframe format for stakeholder review and approval before moving on to the visual design phase:
With a large demographic of male users over 50 years of age, we implemented a colorblind safe web palette in the final design for optimal accessibility contrast:
Collector Car Portfolio / My Favorites
The collector car portfolio was renamed My Favorites and served to provide users a way to quickly save vehicles to their account from any Vehicle Dashboard page when in a logged in state. Though not covered here, logged out users would be presented with a Sign up / Sign in modal in the alternate case.
Shortly after the design portion of the Valuation Tools redesign was complete and in development, I moved onto the expanded iteration of the My Favorites List: "My Garage", a digital garage in which users could create and value track an unlimited number of classic car collections.
Classifieds
The Classifieds section was comprised of For Sale By Owner listings from scrapeable third party websites with compatible data formats. Filters allowed for further list refinements. This module was ultimately descoped and therefore never made it past the wireframe stage.
Comparable Sales
The Comparable Sales module aggregates scrapeable sales data from past vehicle auctions and in-house sources to help users more accurately value their classic vehicles. Like the Classifieds section, this tool was descoped to meet the desired launch date and, as of November 2017, has not been developed.
