Product Designer & Team Lead, looking for a new challenge.

Leading the platform design team.

heycar is a European used car marketplace, funded and backed by Volkswagen Financial Services and other leading captive banks. In early 2022 the company was restructured to unify and centralize our core experience and therefore the platform team was introduced.

My role was to lead the design division, responsible for streamlining the user experience of heycar’s existing markets and set the basis for future expansions. This role was new to me, and my goal as a team lead was to foster collaboration, a data- and research-driven approach, and to provide mentorship. To involve stakeholders early on, we introduced design critique sessions to get feedback, stay aligned, and ensure we contributed to our overall business goals.

My Role

• Foster collaboration between my team and teams responsible for existing markets
• Constant alignment and influence on the global design system
• Mentor and manage four designers spread across different cross-functional teams like our mobile app, white label product, marketing tech, and our core platform design
• Evaluate regular feedback cycles and discuss personal development goals and career plans
• Leverage data and user feedback to provide solutions which have the most impact on our business goals

Platform approach

We quickly identified similarities between all existing markets and for a lot of elements we found a common solution. Nevertheless each site needed some form of customization. The reason can be found in local legal requirements or specific needs from partners like captive banks.
Our solution was to come up with a building block system. Every market takes the same base component and can enable additional features or information.

Our product card provides the flexibility to accommodate each market’s needs.

We used this principle for single components like the product card or the main navigation and for entire pages like the e-commerce checkout to buy a car online.

Basically the number of steps and the information required at each step can be customized to local needs or requirements from partners like captive banks. Any additional customer information mandatory? We got you covered. Additional purchase methods? They all follow the same principle and page structure, but you can add additional form fields, descriptions, or disclaimers.

Outcome and next steps

We were on good track to use our building block principle on every part of the customer journey and aligned very close with our design ops team to create and iterate faster. Work already started to adapt the heycar mobile app for markets outside of Germany. Marketing tech and white label teams did the same.

Before we could put our concept to the test and implement it properly there was a decision made to restructure the entire company and with two rounds of layoffs my position and the position of everyone involved were made redundant.

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

In mid 2018 I joined as Senior Product Designer. I was part of multiple cross-functional teams such as being responsible for the dealer portal or search & discovery. Together with our investor VWFS (Volkswagen Financial Services), heycar Germany wanted 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 of what we wanted to do and what was feasible in the given time. We decided to place the checkout on a separate page, coming from our product detail pages, and split the information into digestible chunks. The result is a maximum of three steps: first selecting the purchase option, second adjusting the monthly rate for leasing or financing, and third entering personal information.

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 throughout 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 completely reworked our main 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 encouraged us to scale our e-commerce product. Step by step we added additional purchase options, partners like Instamotion, opened the checkout for car dealers, and continuously expanded our inventory from a few hundred to over 170,000 cars. In the current state, “buying cars online” is a stable pillar and driver for our business and is now adapted for our European markets.