CarMax is a used vehicle retailer that sells over 1.6 million cars a year across the United States. I worked as the sole designer on CarMax’s Product Intern Team in summer 2021. I worked alongside a Product Manager Intern, a Business Analyst Intern, and three Software Engineering Interns to research opportunities the in post-purchase realm, and I designed and tested a solution to our selected opportunity area of informing customers of their vehicle registration status, owning the product from beginning to end.
CarMax customers are constantly frustrated by the lack of information they have surrounding next steps after purchasing a vehicle from CarMax. The biggest culprit is a lack of transparency on what the vehicle registration process looks like, both for first-time car owners and seasoned purchasers.
I designed a tool that allows anyone who has recently purchased a vehicle from CarMax to track their vehicle registration status on CarMax's website.
Customers can track the registration status of their newly-purchased vehicle, from the moment that CarMax processes their paperwork all the way to when they get their registration information in their mailbox, keeping them up-to-date and constantly in the know.
Before customers even purchase a car or have one in the registration process, they can get clear expectations of what CarMax has to offer them in terms of support once the vehicle registration process begins.
While customers are waiting for their registration paperwork to be processed by CarMax, there might be some extra documents they need to submit or complete. The guided flow feature of the vehicle registration status tracking platform helps guide customers through whichever paperwork they need to submit to CarMax, easing the process for everyone.
Being a new car owner can be daunting, especially when you don't know what to do after the registration process is over. CarMax makes sure customers feel safe and valued by providing detailed next steps, letting customers know that we have their back, even after the process is over.
Going through the vehicle registration process can be confusing. Customers no longer have to endure long wait times from the CarMax call center to ask about their registration status with the addition of a frequently asked questions section and a method for customers to directly contact CarMax if they have any questions not addressed by the FAQs.
At the beginning of my internship, my team was given the following problem statement:
Discover what is top of mind for customers in their first 30 days of car ownership and how CarMax can create a digital experience that helps them celebrate and extend the signature CarMax experience past the sale into ownership.
This was a problem space that CarMax had wanted to dive into but was unable to dedicate enough time to because of how large it was. From here, I began by defining the target user group as customers within their first 30 days of car ownership.
Since my team given such a huge problem space, I conducted extensive research to discover what customers’ biggest concerns within their first 30 days of car ownership were.
The data from my initial research uncovered the following key insights.
To synthesize the team’s findings, I worked with the Product Manager Intern to devise an opportunity solution tree, primarily assessing the importance of potential opportunity spaces. As a team, we all decided that the opportunity space we wanted to prioritize based on user research, technical feasibility, and business needs was,
How might we keep customers up-to-date on where their registration paperwork stands in the process?
I initially struggled to find users to interview who had recently purchased a vehicle from CarMax. To increase the interview sample size, I expanded my reach to anyone visiting the CarMax website, and realized that our target users not only included customers who were within 30 days of their vehicle purchase, but also customers who may be expressing hesitancy to purchase a vehicle from CarMax.
After ideating several opportunity areas for our redefined problem, our hypothesis was born:
We believe that if we give customers a way to digitally track the status of their vehicle registration after purchasing, they will feel better valued and less confused, which will ultimately reduce complaint volume, increase sentiment, and increase purchaser NPS.
My team’s creativity soon began to spark. I planned and facilitated a design studio with the entire team. I felt that everyone, despite the amount of design experience they might have, would have valuable thoughts and ideas to contribute to help progress this project forward, and allowing everyone to freely speak on what they envisioned for the product would help us work better as a team.
The primary feature of the design features a status indicator that informs customers of their vehicle registration status. The lack of transparency behind the status of customers' vehicle registration status ignited a lot of friction in the customer experience, requiring customers to constantly call and contact CarMax (often to no avail) with questions pertaining to when they would receive their title, tags, and registration after purchasing a vehicle.
After purchasing a vehicle, many customers expressed confusion surrounding the next steps that they had to take, and were unsure what CarMax would take care of as opposed to what they had to complete themselves. The inclusion of a to-do list for customers would mitigate that confusion by providing clear instructions on what further action is required to complete the vehicle registration process.
To reduce the amount of calls and contact requests to CarMax to reduce complaint volume and increase sentiment, we included the addition of a FAQ section to address common questions that customers may have throughout the vehicle registration process.
Before moving on to designing a wireframe to test on CarMax users, I had to make a few changes to the design. After seeing the low-fidelity prototype, the engineers mentioned that it wouldn’t be technically feasible to have the to-do list pop out on the side, and my design mentors told me that we needed to be designing mobile-first, as CarMax receives most of its users on the mobile site. As a result, for the next iteration, I changed the to-do list to a drop-down and began to focus on mobile.
After testing this initial wireframe, I found that while customers appreciated having a centralized place to get information on their registration, the purpose of the interface was unclear. After having a design jam and discussing with the rest of the intern product team, we decided that for the MVP that we wanted to release by the end of this summer, it would be more feasible to put a hold on the to-do list and work on developing that further afterwards. Once I changed the prototype to reflect that and used a combination of text and visual cues to focus in on the registration status tracker, customers were much more easily able to tell what the purpose of the interface was.
After some more testing, the feedback I received indicated that while the interface was simple and easy to understand, it felt plain and uninviting. Additionally, customers brought up that with the current prototype, after their vehicle registration was complete, they felt that CarMax was done with them and dropping them off a cliff, an issue that we meant for this product to address based on the research my team conducted during the discovery process. In my next iterations, I addressed these concerns by creating a colorful, friendly section that utilized familiar illustrations from other related pages on the CarMax website to explain next steps.
From the first iteration, customers were unable to tell whether the status tracker was giving the estimated completion time of the step it was on or the estimated completion time of the entire process. After several failed attempts to fix this problem through several different design iterations, I realized the issue may be in the information architecture of the interface and began some design explorations. After testing a revamped status tracker, 100% of customers were able to tell that the estimated completion time was for the entire process, rather than just one step.
Another recurring theme I found in the user feedback I received was that users felt that they lacked a sense of completion and satisfaction after the vehicle registration process was complete. To address this, I designed a screen that would look visually different from the rest of the status tracking page to guide the user towards more actions and provide more closure. I utilized CarMax's design system components to create several design explorations of this new "congrats, you're a car owner now!" page.
Throughout testing, customers expressed that they wanted to be guided through the paperwork process, showing that there was a need for something like the previously scrapped to-do list. As the engineers were working on developing the first iteration of the interface, I returned to the to-do list, asked my design mentors for help, and simplified it into a step-by-step guided flow meant to walk customers through the process of submitting paperwork that CarMax may need from them.
While my team was unable to see the real-time results of our product before our internships came to an end, we were able to run a 404 test, testing to see how many website-visiting customers visit our empty "Registration Status Tracking" page on the MyCarMax site. When users clicked on the page, they were automatically redirected to a survey asking them about their expectations for the page. We were able to hit 94.3% of our goal traffic, and 93% of survey respondents said it was important or very important to be able to track the status of their registration and a majority of purchasers had expectations of the page that aligned with our design.
This was important because it gave us tangible data to prove that this was a space that was worth exploring, despite our product not officially launching.
This was my first design internship, and I learned more than I could have ever imagined. I was able to grow both personally and professionally and still continue to draw from my experiences during my internship at CarMax as I progress through my design career. Some of my main takeaways were:
At first, I wasn't very confident with my own intuition and design decisions. I constantly asked for feedback on my ideas without first executing them. While feedback is crucial for the design process, in order to grow as a designer, I realized I needed to trust myself and just start designing before asking for feedback, as it's also easier to provide feedback on designs that already have a visual.
I constantly found myself going back and forth between steps of the design process that I had been taught in school. This internship helped me learn that there isn't one singular process that design takes, and the design process for every product is always changing.
Transitioning from Computer Science and software engineering, I found that I was able to understand and communicate well with the engineers on my team. I understood the way that they thought about things and knew the time it would take to develop a particular feature, so I was able to scale my design based on engineering constraints without difficulty. I think this will be an extremely useful asset for me in the future.
