Case Study

Dash: Reimagining Car Buying in AR

While working on Lexus.com during my time at Team One, I was able to learn a lot about the car industry. My learnings from working on both customer and dealer facing parts of the business birthed this project.

(Background)

(Role)

product design, research, user testing, prototyping, strategy

Problem

There is lack of trust between car dealers and car buyers in the car buying process due to lack of communication.

Empower people to feel confident about their relationship with their money, while providing an ultimate digital experience that fits more naturally into people’s lives. This leads to better customer experience & builds customer loyalty.

Solution

Dash is a platform which uses shared augmented reality sessions to connect you with dealers, and inherently build interpersonal connections, and trust, between buyers and dealers before finalizing transactions.

Dash

Customize in Real Time

Visualize & design your car in the comfort of the room/space you're in at the moment.

Get on your scheduled augmented reality shared session and discusss your model's build details with a dealer. Build an interpersonal connection up to the final purchase.

Schedule Sessions

Shared AR Session

After building your car, you schedule an augmented reality shared session (similar to a FaceTime call). The session connects you to a dealer, both parties can interact with the model, and setup further steps.

View Annotated User Flow

Process

Discover

To begin, I first dug deep into car industry consumer reports to know how, and what buyers felt about the purchase experience. After this I talked to Product Designers at Carmax, and people who were in the market for new vehicles, to further understand the experience.

Something interesting was: vehicle buyers using a branded app were 73% more likely to make a purchase from the dealership, and after making a purchase, booked 25% more service appointments than shoppers without an app.

For dealers, their biggest priority is increasing lead volume and conversions. Buyers already know what they want and don't want to be pressured into getting more things than bargained for. Which is why buyers hate haggling for a 'good' price.

Define

Using my research insights, I created an ‘experiential’ shopper persona and mapped out the user needs to find which painpoints could be addressed.

Design

After I began my first round of sketching & prototyping, I referenced Apple’s ARKit design guidelines to learn the principles needed to design for the medium. I kept a number of guidelines close to heart but the three below stood out.

Help people understand when to locate a surface and place an object

I used an 'incomplete' focus square as the visual cue to communicate that surface detection is.

The focus square becomes 'complete' with a '+' icon in its center to communicate to users that a flat surface has been found. Additionally as a second means of communicating a flat surface being found, a green notification bubble appears in the top left.

No product is complete with its branding and the message it stands for. I concurrently worked on the branding as I designed the app. I wanted it to feel playful, futuristic & most importantly, useful.

Founders Grotesk font felt confident. That is a feeling I want users to feel as they interact with the product.

Designing the Brand

When I began designing for this, I had controls that were on all sides of the screen. I needed to reduce the number of onscreen controls. iOS UIKit's app drawer became very useful here.

I was able to take all the bottom horizontal controls tab, and put them in the app drawer, which is collapsible.

Use the entire display & Favor direct manipulation over separate onscreen controls

Develop

My develop phase consisted of brining my wireframes to life in a prototype app that I made after learning how to code for augmented reality in Xcode. I also did some user testing of my app to get feedback on its viability and areas for improvement.

This is a screen recording of an early prototype of the app showing instances of the guidelines I followed.

If you'd like to see a detailed flow of how the app works, please click this button:

View User Flow

Some quotes from user testing

“I’ve never bought a car but this feels & works like something I’d definitely use” - Jazmine Lawrence, Student
‍
“As a techie & someone who's looking for a new car, I think this the simplest way this AR tech can be used. It's a seamless way to communicate.” - Treasure Brown,

"This shows you can work within a system and empathize developers you'll work with." - Tyler Townley, Design Manager

Next Steps

This is a product that I'm very excited to build out, and with that excitement I want to push the UI further based on feedback I got from my design team at Team One. I want to design the back end of what this would look like for dealers. Assuming having real dealers causes the overhead for the business, I'm also experimenting with a conversational UI in the sessions chat feature of the product.