Carlypso
Role
Design Team of One
Responsibilities
Designed the end-to-end experiences for multiple consumer-facing tools for the ever growing business needs including:
The Website
The Vehicle Status Tool
The Comparison Tool
The Mercedes Benz Configuratior
Team
1 Designer
4 Engineers
1 Product Manager
X no. of Sales Reps
X no. of Operations Reps
One of our most differentiating values for our business, was that we held no physical inventory. So how do you display cars to sell when you don’t have cars to sell? Enter the Vehicle Model Card, which organized cars into group collections sorted by model
A new way to buy…
In 2015, I joined this early stage Y-Combinator company with a mission to disrupt the used-car industry with its unique business model, which gave customers direct access to thousands of pre-owned vehicles without the overhead costs. How did we manage that? With zero inventory, we would help find the pre-owned vehicle you wanted at car auctions, then purchase and conduct a 360 point inspection.
As their first and only designer, my focus spanned a wide range of end-to-end experiences. Including designing our primary website to help users discover cars to buy and learn about our unique unique purchase at auction model, while also designing consumer facing tools to help optimize stale processes for our sales and operations teams.
We made this interactive scrollable timeline to help customers learn about the process and detailed timeline of the purchasing process. This page helped reduce the number of calls to our care team!
Consumer Facing Products & Sales Tools
As a company of only 25 people, everyone was involved in the design process. Meaning that many of the product decisions came as a result from us interacting with our sales and operations team to learn about the processes we were translating into online experiences . These products included: The Website, Tracking Tools, Configuartion tool, and the Vehicle Comparison Tool.
The Browse Cars Page - In the first month of launching this page to help customers explore potential, we had a 15.3% close rate, over 2x higher than all other channels combined.
The Website
How do you introduce customers to a new way of purchasing online cars? With a website to help explain the process and give them a way to browse potential inventory that offers key information and touchpoints to provide them with the help they need. –– Keep in mind this was 2015, and people ordering Teslas online wasn’t quite the norm yet.
Mobile web views of the refinement navigation workflows.
This tracking tool saved our Sales reps mucho time!
The Vehicle Status Page
Our internal process of getting cars for customers at the best price involved complex logistics between sales, operations, and finance teams. We were getting flooded with calls from customers asking "where is my car?". So we developed a user profile tracking tool.
This product reduced our phone calls to zero and combined multiple logistics into a simple and flexible dashboard.
Desktop views of the Vehicle Status Page.
Inline experience to keep users all on one page.
Mercedes-Benz Configurator Tool
During my time at Carlypso, we did a special partnership with Mercedes-Benz, where we had access to a large inventory of their gently used vehicles. To cater to the typical Mercedes customer, we built a configuration tool to help them find the best used Benz for them.
Comparison Tool
We created this feature for our sales experts to use when customers were further down the purchase funnel to help showcase side-by-side comparisons to help them better decide between similar vehicle selections.