Edmunds.com

Roles: Senior Experience Designer, Art Director, Usability Research

Strategic, cross-platform design for wired and mobile to create a unified customer experience. Focused on user research, brand cohesion, and integrated email campaigns. Working on agile teams, projects include concept and design of Facebook apps, mobile app design, social media strategy, identifying and exploring new markets via field research, focus groups, diary studies and competitive analysis.

Edmunds.com Used Car Shopping Diary Study

Six-month diary study. Shanice (persona: TJ), was in-market for a new (used) car.

Shanice had a long commute and costs for maintenance and gas for her 2001 GMC Jimmy were piling up. She was looking for a late model Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, but she kept gravitating toward the Chrysler 300. This behavior was consistent for her persona, but we wanted to dig deeper into her struggle between practicality and emotion. The post-it exercise captured key points and struggles from Shanice’s diary entries and my conversations with her.

Results: initiatives to improve our tools for TJ to save time and find the vehicle (s)he wants. Focus on the used market and highlight data like True Cost to Own (TCO) and True Market Value (TMV) so the pitfalls of a “dream car” with high mileage over a more reliable car can be properly considered.

Mobile Web Redesign

Tasked with evaluating the current mobile experience and making iterative enhancements to the shopping vs research experience, increase personalization via favoriting and accessing saved data across multiple devices.

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Core Redesign Ideation

Edmunds.com began Q1 2013 by changing their company focus from research to shopping. The first steps began in parallel: The Core Redesign Ideation and the Design Refresh. The brand benchmark study and both in-house and remote user testing, we knew the top pain points on the site were navigation, page load time, the inability for the users to find what they needed and an inconsistent experience from page to page. Qualitative user research told us the visual design was outdated and larger photos were desired. 12 months of rapid prototyping, multivariate testing, Foresee surveys and NetPromotor score analysis followed.

UxD Team brought design inspiration to share as a first step at refreshing the Edmunds design language.

 

I compiled the visuals + thoughts into a mood board to share our vision with the executive team.

 

We repeated the previous exercise, but this time looking at specific pain points on Edmunds.com and proposed to the group what we’d change.

 

After rapid prototyping of modules inspired by the mood board, we put the work into context for the executive team. 

 

Two examples of continued refinement of pattern ideation: Module color bars and Tool Tips as part of phase one of the core pattern library.

 

Homepage before (right) and redux (below) with large vehicle photo, the use of small vehicle images instead of flat illustrations and Bing/Google inspired search box at the center of the page.

Search Results Page before (right) and redux (below) with redesigned faceting, highllghted inventory matches via a “scoreboard” and cleaner, better organized search result cards.

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