Lithia & Driveway
Performance Analytics & Reporting Suite
As Principal Product Designer, I was tasked with assessing a troubled initiative that was over budget, lacking strategy, and raising alarm within executive circles.
Contributions
- User Research
- Design Vision
- Concepting
- UX Design
- Prototyping
- Usability Testing
- UI Design
- Design System Componentry
- Design Specs
- Progress Measurement
- Design Iteration
Legacy Experience
The organization relied upon the legacy reporting and analytics platform to gain insights into store operations, employee performance, and vehicle statistics. This platform informed strategic decisions for over 10 years but suffered from bloat, poor performance, and difficulty in maintaining and innovating.
In-Flight MVP Experience
I joined the operations product team as this initiative approached launch. After 3 years in development, significant pressure had built and the experience, provided few tangible improvements over legacy, failed to wow, and lacked a coherent vision. Prior to launch, all work was paused and I was tasked with assessing the experience.
User Research
The clock was ticking as I spun up a series of investigations and activities including stakeholder elicitation, user interviews, user segment identification, persona development, journey mapping, and card sorting.
Experience Audit
I conducted a heuristic assessment of the 1.0 and 2.0 experiences and drafted a comparison artifact to gain an understanding of the new application’s value and liabilities vs the legacy app.
Synthesis
I brought in Product, Design, and Engineering representatives to help synthesize the research, organize findings into themes, and develop a position on how best to make a meaningful impact within the space.
Strategy
Findings pointed to a few key areas of opportunity. By improving orientation and wayfinding, re-routing non-critical functions , and upgrading a few key functions we could address the needs of a large number of our users.
IA, Object Models, and Data
We developed foundational artifacts to help ourselves and others understand the nature of the information within, develop hierarchies, navigational patterns, and systems that would make design and implementation easier.
UX
I rapidly designed, prototyped, then tested workflows to increase confidence in assumptions, and gauge effectiveness against benchmark performance.
UI
I leveraged our design system where possible to lean into economies of scale and developed new patterns that had not been encountered yet.
Specifications
I right-sized the design specs to ensure engineering had the right fidelity of instruction that would streamline implementation without over-prescribing.
Outcomes
After a 5 month design and development window, initial launch was met with positive reception among our users and leadership. We measured reductions in onboarding times, increased utilization of key reports, and increased depth in store investigations.
Iteration
Missing capabilities were routed to other applications but work remained to fill important gaps. We circled round to continue on the path to routing and consolidating capabilities via an operations hub as part of our new long term strategy.
