The Challenge
Car Dealers spend millions of dollars annually on online advertising but most do not understand what the return is on that investment. They know they need to spend the money to keep pace with their competition but it is very difficult for them to gain vision into what advertising spend contributed to specific sales.

This lack of understanding leads to poor investments, lost opportunities, and an overall lack of trust in their advertising partners.

The Approach
The Product and UX organizations at Cox Automotive worked hand in hand to conduct research into the issues dealers are facing to discover opportunities for improved analytics.

Based on those findings I led the design process to establish a new user journey that would help dealers understand how their inventory is merchandised and advertised along with how their customers are moving through the conversion funnel.

The Results
The newly designed pages and data visualizations that make up the improved user journey were tested with dealers and have been shown to improve their understanding of both the overall quality of their merchandising efforts along with the specific advertising partners that are driving the highest quality traffic to their online properties.

By providing accurate advertising attribution this improved user experience allows dealers to maximize their return on advertising spend and capitalize on more opportunities.

The Challenge
A member of the Vermont Teddy Bear / Pajamagram executive team stopped by one day and mentioned to me that they wished we could find a way to sell more matching sets of pajamas because it is good for the business. She explained that people buy these matching pajama sets for a number of reasons but one of the big drivers of this behavior is the desire to take funny family photos during the Thanksgiving holiday that will then be used as cards for the holidays that follow.

I started the process by documenting the number of clicks to complete and the average time on task to establish benchmarks I could use as I tested possible solutions.

The Approach
After a review of competitive approaches failed to uncover a novel approach I explored options for alternative interactions. My first attempt eliminated the context switching problem I identified during my initial review but introduced a new issue. While testing the new wizard-based approach users mentioned being overwhelmed by the amount of information they needed to input to complete an order.

To resolve that issue the final solution progressively reveals the required inputs via an accordion interface so users become invested in the process and thus, more likely to complete their purchase.

The Results
Once the new interactions were launched our analytics showed a sustained $9.00 average order value increase as well as improved conversion rates. The new user flow and interactions also reduced the number of steps to complete an order by 50% while reducing user error rates as well.

Selling more products to each customer reduces handling time and shipping costs for the business. These operational efficiencies contribute to the return on investment for
this project.