FedEx Self-service
A story of listening, designing, observing, and integrating to find a solutions that fits.
What is MaxOffer?
MaxOffer is a rapidly growing product on CarMax’s supply side of their business. The tool allows dealers to appraise vehicles and instantly sell their vehicles to CarMax. This is mainly used for customer trade-ins that don’t match the dealership’s product line.
My role
Yup, that’s me 👋 As the Senior Product Designer on MaxOffer at CarMax, I executed every step of the design process from research, discovery and prototyping, to high-fidelity designs in Figma.
My approach
Like many emerging products, MaxOffer has a long list of opportunity spaces. Using continuous discovery and design thinking strategies, my team and I rapidly delivered value while building a roadmap for its future success.
Empathize
Directed discovery
Through continuous discovery and mapping out the user journey, I identified major pain points in the user’s post-sell experience. From there, I began more directed discovery to investigate high-value solutions for our users.
Interview Approach
My goal with customer interviews is to put the user at ease and make them feel like they are talking to a friend.
Who I am - I am a researcher. There are no wrong answers.
Who are you - I learn about what a typical day looks like for them, how they use the tool and how long they’ve used for, and even how they got started in the car business. This gives context and helps them open up.
Generative - I always include a few open-ended questions to ensure I am not leading the witness. “Can you describe the last time you did __. What was that like for you?”
Targeted - This is where I can get into the real meat of a hypothesis. At this stage, it is important to direct while letting the user lead so they have a chance to give us more context and potential workarounds they’ve built.
Define
Problem:
One of the major issues that came up in both our dealers and CarMax employee conversations was dealers’ confusion about how to send us titles.
“I don’t know where to send my title”
“I already sent you my title but I keep getting emails from CarMax for updates.”
“Just to be safe, I take a photo of the title with the shipping label and email the photo and tracking number to you every time I send CarMax a title. I want you to know I sent it.”
Why it’s critical:
Sending and receiving titles is the most critical part of the post-sell process. Without a title, a vehicle is unsaleable for CarMax and dealers do not get paid.
Ideate
How might we give dealers an easy way to send us titles
The solution needed to ensure:
Titles were sent to the correct address
Titles could be sent together (bulk shipment)
Shipment data synced with our follow-up BOTs and systems so our customer service reps had visibility when a title was in transit
Design - MVP
In close collaboration with our developers and Product Managers, I designed an MVP that allowed dealers to add create a shipment and add titles from their dashboard.
~ What we observed ~
Data:
Only 13% of users used the bulk feature
14% of accepted vehicles were associated with a FedEx label (30% goal)
Observations (FullStory):
Long pauses and points of confusion when prompted to send titles together
Defaulted to creating a new label for every shipment
Unaware of bulk shipment feature
~ What we heard ~
“Instead of printing another label why don’t I just put it in the same shipment?” - Ivette
“It’s too much for me to go in and print each when I have a stack of titles here” - Anne
~ What we learned ~
Title clerks are incredibly busy and dealing with more than just MaxOffer titles
They often have anywhere from 2 to 200 outstanding titles at a time
Tech solutions need to meld with an analog process
Bulk shipments need to be a main feature of the product
Let’s Jam
I lead a design jam workshop with my team and other designers to generate a large number of ideas for how to iterate.
Scenario:
A dealer has a stack of seven titles ready to send to Carmax. We want to give them the ability to create labels, send, and track those titles from their dashboard
Sketch a design that allows them to:
Create a FedEx shipment
All multiple titles to the same shipment
Track the shipment from theor dashabord
Create new shipping labels.
Considerations:
they often have 50-200 outstanding titles at a time
Not tech savvy users
~ Let’s test ~
I conducted a series of user tests with specific users I found win FullStory that were struggling the most with the first version.
Let’s hear from Shelly…
Final Designs
Centralized place to create shipments and add titles
Guides users through the bulk shipment experience
Easy to track shipments, edit, and add more titles
Only needed front-end dev tweaking