Company
Fjord Design
Role
Junior Interaction Designer
Year
2015
Backstage at a Car Dealership
As an Interaction Designer at Fjord, I assisted an automotive retailer in their quest to become the first dealership website where customers could purchase a car online. The work included: ethnographic research into the current ecommerce pilot model, documenting the process of other ecommerce systems, synthesizing research, hosting a co-design workshop with stakeholders, and working with the client to create a development roadmap.
I spent almost 2 weeks shadowing and interviewing car salespeople and other employees at 3 different dealerships in California. It was immediately apparent that the lack of consistent and timely data entry was seriously undermining the accuracy of the inventory system. Customers would call to inquire about cars that had not arrived yet or that had already been sold. Another problem was the lack of a simple tool to track the location of vehicles. Salespeople left customers for up to 45 minutes at a time just to look for the car that they wanted to test drive. There were many opportunities to design solutions that could either automate data entry, or incentivize more regular tracking.
I not only shadowed an interviewed employees, but also conducted intercept interviews of customers at the dealerships. A lack of trust between salespeople and customers had resulted in a deep rift and the inability to interact effectively. Customers and salespeople had vastly different expectations of what is appropriate behavior in the context of buying a car. This could be seen in the number of appointments customers made but did not keep or cancel and in the impact working in a dealership had on employees’ view of the very nature of humanity.
This project was unusual because it was one of Fjord’s first joint projects with Accenture. After the first two days in the field, we had to pivot the Accenture team members from collecting only quantitative data and train them to conduct employee and customer interviews. I mentored three team members in interview techniques and the type of information to collect.
We later had to cope with two sudden shifts in the schedule. The client declared they wanted to attend the final day of research, and requested a readout of our work to date. We had to adapt by cutting the planned interviews for the day and assembling a preliminary set of themes. In order to emphasize that these were not the results of a thorough analysis, we presented using post-its and hand-drawn charts.
I worked with another interaction designer and the Accenture team to build a current state customer journey, an employee journey, and categorize our insights into themes. We provided a set of design opportunities that included quick improvements to boost efficiency as well as longer-term goals like products to develop to become the first online car dealership.
