Introducing Instant Offer
By leveraging research, design, algorithms, and logic flows we launched Instant Offer to MaxOffer dealerships across the US.
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 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
Continuous discovery
Through weekly discovery calls with our users and quarterly surveys, one theme emerged over and over again - our dealers wanted faster offers.
Define
Why speed matters:
Dealers mostly use MaxOffer for customer trade-ins. They rely on MaxOffer to give fast and accurate appraisals on customers’ vehicles so they can secure a sale.
This means that once they put in an offer, they usually have a customer waiting in their lobby.
The problem:
The current system requires photos, sends the photo to a buyer at one of our stores, and waits for a buyer to put in an offer on the vehicle. In total, it can take up to 20-30 minutes to get an offer.
“Every second counts when I have a customer waiting in front of me.”
“Offers often take 20-30 minutes. I't’s really hard to keep a customer around for that long. ”
“If the offer takes too long the customer will sometimes leave and I lose the sale.”
As I mapped out the dealer’s journey map, I identified working with customers and securing a sale as the highest emotional moment in the journey. This means it is the most likely for frustration when wait times were longer than anticipated.
Ideate
How might we give dealers faster offers?
By working across product teams, we identified existing systems and algorithms that would not only allow us to give faster offers but give instant offers to our dealers.
Design - MVP
By leveraging the power of CaMax’s Instant Offer algorithm, I designed a low-effort MVP test that allowed us to give dealers Instant offers on qualifying vehicles.
This design placed an Instant Offer button on the front page of the application.
~ What we observed ~
Even though this was the most requested feature:
With too many buttons to choose from dealers reverted to engrained habits
There was a distrust of algorithmic offers. Dealers cherry-picked “clean” cars to avoid arbitrations
Dealers didn’t always read their emails and were sometimes unaware of the feature.
~ What I heard in discovery ~
“I was shocked how fast it came back.”
“I wouldn’t use it on an older kind of car because we don’t want the number to come back to incorrect.” - Justin
“A lot of people here arn’t using it. They are creatures of habit.” - Calvin
~ What we learned ~
Our dealers are re-occurring users with existing habits that are hard to change
If they were ineligible for an Instant Offer they would need to answer the same questions for a traditional live. This was frustrating.
Let’s itterate
🏆 Goals based on user feedback:
Eliminate decision fatigue
Build off pre-existing habits
Surprise and delight users with IO and eliminate extra work
~ Unifiy the flow ~
While many of my product challenges require traditional design, this required architectural, flow design in order to surprise and delight users within their existing experience.
Leveraging the same technology, I identified a set of eligibility checks to guide users with qualifying vehicles to an Instant Offer. Vehicles that did not qualify were seamlessly sent to upload photos without having to re-answer questions.
~ Unifiy the backend ~
I also worked with the team and mapped out the application’s backend architecture in order to ensure data flow seamlessly into our in-store systems.
Final Designs
Unified the Live Trade and Instant Offer Experience into one seamless flow
Increased user engagement by 200%
Increased user’s sell rate by 60%