Transforming user pain points into dynamic interactions for a used car marketplace

Company: Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace. On one side of the marketplace, private sellers use our platform to sell their cars (B2C). On the other side, dealerships across the UK use our platform to bid for and buy cars in an online daily sale (B2B).

Project: Delivering a new web and mobile app feature for sellers called 'timeline', which visualises the user's car selling progress with real-time alerts and updates.

My role: Leading content strategy and messaging, content design, and UX/UI writing.

Tools: Google sheets, Google docs, Figma, FigJam, Jira.

Problem & Opportunity

Problem: To sell a car on Motorway, users need to create a vehicle profile where they tell us about their car, take photos, and report any damage. Once this step is complete, Motorway conducts a few internal checks before their car goes into the next daily sale.

However, we didn't proactively communicate what was happening behind the scenes so there was a lack of visibility for our users. They frequently complained that they were unsure what was happening after completing their profile. Our users either didn’t understand the full process of selling a car on Motorway or if our procedural checks took longer than usual, it felt like their car was “stuck” in the process.

Source of insights:

Qualitative: ‘side by sides’ (listening in on calls) with customer sales agents.
Qualitative: customer sales team feedback compiled in ‘Hellonext’.
Quantitive: a high percentage of calls didn’t result in an internal status change (indicating users are calling for progress updates rather than a call that's connected to an action that moves them along their selling journey).

User story #1: As a user, I want to know what's going on behind the scenes, so that I fully understand the process of selling my car on Motorway.

User story #2: As a user, I want to see how I'm progressing through the car selling journey, so that I feel motivated to stay selling with Motorway instead of going elsewhere.

Business opportunity: how might we keep our users in the loop about how their sale is progressing, educate them about the process, and create a dynamic, delightful experience?

Process

1. Understanding our users

The task: identifying the biggest pain points for users in the selling journey and the key moments they felt out of the loop.

The team: cross-functional collaboration with a user researcher, product designer and product manager.

My role: co-writing research plans and scripts, analysing Trustpilot reviews, ‘conversation mining’ for keywords and terminology, patterns and trends.

2. Understanding our systems

The task: mapping the internal statuses that a sale goes through (manually marked by our agents) to the progressing timeline states that would be reflected in the UI, including edge cases.

The team: cross-functional collaboration with engineers, customer sales agents, a product designer, and a product manager.

My role: product naming, information architecture & content hierarchy, and translating internal jargon into user-centric, compelling UX copy.

3. Influencing stakeholders

The task: pushing for a more human, conversational approach through contextual help.

The team: the whole product squad.

My role: integrating brand personality, tone, voice and style into the UX copy, balanced with being informative and functional.

A specific win that I'm proud of:

Version 1 of the timeline was a basic outline of the 4 key steps we identified: Call us / Profile check / Live sale / Highest offer.

I advocated for a version 2, where we include conversational, contextual help as info modals, effectively integrating common FAQs into the timeline UI. This is so we pre-empt user needs and give the right information at the right time, in a seamless, effortless way.

Leading with the benefit for the user

Guiding the user

Reassuring the user

Impact

Impact on our users

Users get automated progress updates, and therefore a more dynamic, engaging experience:

Since introducing the timeline feature, site visits to this part of the seller profile have increased by 21%, in comparison to when the website and app didn’t have this feature.

Users have a better understanding of our process:

We’re consistently seeing 2 or 3x the amount of daily page views than daily users. This implies this page in particular is constantly being revisited. So it’s serving its purpose of being the go-to place for users for updates, actively adding value to the their experience.

Impact on the business

There's more automation in our processes and customer sales agents spend less time on low-value phone calls. We have a more streamlined funnel, getting more cars for sale faster:

The average number of calls per seller has dropped from 3 to 1.8.

Learnings & reflections

Driven by customer focus, we transformed parts of the journey that were pain points for users, due to lack of visibility and understanding, into a more dynamic, engaging experience. With the timeline feature, we empowered users by increasing their understanding of the process, and helped them celebrate small wins as they could visualise their progress towards their end goal of a successful sale.

In terms of what I'd do differently next time, I would take a more holistic approach, beyond a 'product squad' lens, to make sure the timeline accounted for the customer's post-sale experience too, and not just the profiling and live sale process. This would create a more unified journey for the user where everything they need to do is captured in the timeline, rather than some post-sale steps sitting outside of it.