Vehicle Inventory Management
Dealerships need a cohesive way to view and manage their vehicle inventory. The solution below has set out to solve this problem for several different business applications.
Example of one of the workflow diagrams we walked away with after the summit.
Discovery
Over a week long summit with key stakeholders, product owners, engineering leadership and UX we sought to answer one question: What is vehicle inventory management to our organization as a whole?
The Answer: A system of record of vehicle inventory utilizing a vehicle catalog and is fed by data and image management APIs. With a layer of UI Components.
One of many whiteboard drawings that led to the workflows on the left.
What does this really mean? Through UI widgets, data APIs and complex integrations we plan to solve a problem of one data source for inventory.
After many workflow/user journey sessions to prepare and during the summit we walked away with some great assumptions to validate over the next 2 months.
Personas
Defining all of the personas that touch vehicle inventory in a dealership can be rather complex as we started to find through initial lightening talks with dealership employees many different roles interact with inventory at varying stages in the process. We mapped this journey and began to define who we wanted to target for validation.
Example of the vehicle detail page.
Example of a standard widget to be placed with in our product from an outside data source.
Design
Following that process I began the prototyping process. Working within our common experience pattern library I crafted an experience that I felt fit the needs and workflow outlined from the previous process. Through a lot of input from key stakeholders and product owners we came up with a working prototype using InVision and Sketch to begin to test with.
Validation
Our initial study was with 12 participants spread over several roles in the dealership and 2 internal stakeholders.
Roles Interviewed
2 - Sales Managers
2 - Controllers
1- Assistant Controller
3 - Accounts Payable/Titling
2 - Receptionist/Inventory Clerks
Each role works with inventory every day, some all day, some just view it for informational purposes or may edit one thing on a specific vehicle. These roles also covered various size of dealership and dealership groups to get a good measure of large organization and small organization needs.
Research Objectives
We outlined 3 main workflows (stocking-in, editing and viewing inventory vehicles) that each persona would have some insight on and based their current interactions with our tools to base all of our questions on.
UX Recommendations
Then based on those findings I made certain UX recommendations to product leadership, owners and development leads. These were well received and altered some very important workflows we had originally designed.
Next Steps
Currently we have a pilot scheduled for late 2018. As the project has continued conversations with users is ongoing as we find we need spot research on certain interactions. We are now outlining goals, signals and metrics using the HEART framework to begin how we will track certain key performance indicators as we move into beta and general release.