Product Designer & Team Lead, looking for new adventures.

I’m Marc Kaufholz, 36-year-old product designer and team lead, based near Berlin with 12+ years experience designing delightful UI & UX.

Say "Hello" 👋

At the moment I am leading the plaform design team at heycar.

heycar is a european used car marketplace, funded and backed by Volkswagen and other leading car manufacturers. In early 2022 the teams were restructured to unify and centralize our core product experience. Leading a team of four, I’m helping to streamline all requirements, foster collaboration and research to provide a unified solution for our existing markets and as basis for future expansion.

heycar goes e-commerce: buy your car 100% online.

In mid 2018 I joined heycar as Senior Product Designer. I was part of multiple cross-functional teams such as being responsible for the dealerportal or search & discovery. Together with our investor VWFS (Volkswagen Financial Services) heycar Germany wants to sell cars entirely online and I moved to the commerce team to create the first e-commerce checkout for our german market.

Getting started

After gathering all necessary requirements I started ideating and brainstorming together with our engineers and product management. As a result I created basic wireframes and from there initial drafts and prototypes. That helped to get an impression what we want to do and what is feasible in the given time. We decided to place the checkout as separate page, coming from our product detail pages, and split the information in digestable chunks. The result is a maximum of three steps. First selecting the purchase option, second adjust the monthly rate for leasing or financing and third personal information.

1

Select the preferred way to buy the car. Either pay monthly or buy the car outright.

2

Monthly rate is adjustable by chaging the basic conditions. Only applies for leasing and financing.

3

Contact details to reserve the car and generate the contract.

User Research

Before expanding to our core product and adding additional feature, product management and me wanted to find out what users think about buying a car online.
We used different methods. A/B testing, surveys and the most important moderated and unmoderated user interview. As a result we changed how we communicate benefits, who is our partner and provided information throughtout the entire journey.

Iterating

Following user studies I decided to focus on the initial phase of a car buying journey: Finding the right car. I completly reworked our main our navigation to give access to additional information around buying a car online. We added additional entry points such as highlight related filters, quick entries from the homepage, navigation and landingpages. We improved also the communication of benefits such as delivery, TÜV check and guarantee. In addition the checkout was adapted for new partners and prepared expanding our e-commerce inventory.

Result: From zero to hero

Our MVP proved promising and positive user feedback was encouraging to scale our e-commerce product. Step by step we added additional purchase options, partners like Instamotion, open the checkout for cardealers and continously expanding our inventory from a few hundred to 170.000+ cars. In the current state “buying cars online” is a stable pillar and driver for our business and is one now adapted for our european markets.

Airbus.com: We make it fly.

On airbus.com, we at Aperto, brought together the entire product portfolio on a single B2B platform, following the "One Brand" digital brand design. As an art director, in a multi national team across europe, my task was to translate the design vision into reality.

My Role

  • Translating the initial design vision, which was already based on our clients brand identity, into the new airbus.com
  • Together with a UX Designer, we created the new platform structure
  • Creating a rather small design system to quickly create multiple layouts based on the same components
  • Preparing micro transitions and prototypes Cooperate closely with the frontend department based in Paris

Jury statement

The elaborately made website brings together the entire product communication of the company on one platform and thus offers a seamless customer experience. The design is extremely high-quality and reflects the brand's claim in detail in terms of form, technically and content.

More happy clients and fun projects.

A variety of projects for different clients during my time at DDB Berlin. My main task was to create the digital extension for advertising campaigns, mostly for Volkswagen. In addition I created styleguides (for PartyPoker), icon designs (AEG) and some experimental stuff.