Summary: The goal of this brief was to check the information architecture and overall usability of the newly designed BMW UVL site through user testing at Auto Trader's head offices in Manchester. We observed how users behaved naturally on the site and investigated how they interacted with filters through the search journey. We assessed the efficiency of the vehicle details page and the learnability of the finance calculator. Lastly we considered how consumers made enquiries and booked test drives. This testing was critical.

Role: Lead UX

User testing

Being the Experience Lead on this project, it was down to me to not only create the question sets but discover and bucket themes based on the user feedback. I collaborated with BMW and AutoTrader in the room whilst the interviews were going on to discuss ideas and highlight pain points to address. Ongoing user testing is critical to the success of any digital or online brand. Market sentiment will always change, you always need to remain in the centre of it. 

Results

Applying a simple 'pass' or 'fail' to the journeys as we were going allowed for quick analysis at the end as to what required attention and what did not.

Summary

I then translated these results through to actionable outputs and fed them back to BMW. Here's a few scamps to indicate a better car-saving process process as we discovered from the testing that customers had ambiguity on entering this step. It's obvious to see (in retrospect) how just tapping a star and seeing a minor copy change isn't enough feedback to indicate the comparison functionality is activated.

I had the idea to make the process far more obvious by using a toaster mechanism at the bottom of the screen. Animation of a "+1" or car icon would also provide much better feedback. The new toaster then provides the perfect "next step" for the user to act on when they're ready to start comparing selected vehicles but is also sufficiently out the way to not stop them from browsing vehicles in that moment.

Post-testing updated Information architecture

One of the main reasons for the testing was to put the IA through it's paces. Here we see the recommendations I suggested and that are now live in an effort to clean up the nav and help users achieve their goal quickly.

The nav discussed above is only apparent on mobile