Team: 4 UX Researchers
Tools: User Interviews, User Flow Diagramming, Affinity Mapping, Qualitative Analysis, FigJam, Otter.Ai, Google Docs, Zoom
Duration: Oct - Nov 2023 (8 weeks)
Responsibilities: In this project, my role as a UX Researcher encompassed the entire research process. I contributed by creating the research plan, interview guides, screening surveys, recruiting and moderating interviews, recording notes, synthesizing insights, and presenting findings to executive stakeholders, ensuring a comprehensive and actionable research-driven approach.
My contributions are heavily emphasized in these areas of the project:
- Created screening survey
- Recruited 5 participants through convenience sampling
- Lead interviewer for 6 out of 8 participants
- Synthesizing and reporting insights
As part of my Advanced Usability class, we partnered with CDK Global’s UX Research Team to delve into how dealership behaviors influence customer decision-making in the car-buying process. The objective was to gain a better understanding of the problem space and identify opportunities for enhancing the car buying experience.
For this project, we were tasked with choosing methods, conducting research, and were constrained to not interact with dealerships.
How do customers perceive and respond to different dealership actions and behaviors when making a purchasing decision?
Buying a car is a significant life decision, often accompanied by a set of challenges. Common attitudes suggest that customers frequently encounter difficulties with dealerships and salesmen, which can detract from the overall car-buying experience.
1. Understand how dealership behaviors influence customer decision making on car-buying
2. Identify opportunity areas for enhancing the car-buying process for customers.
3. Provide actionable insights on customer thoughts and behaviors to CDK Global.
For our research, we went with in-depth semi-structured interviews that lasted 45-60 min. This method was chosen as we could not interact with dealerships which eliminated the opportunity for more observational methods like contextual inquiry.
Before recruitment, we floated a screener survey to ensure that participants met the criteria we
set, these included:
1. Above 18 years of age
2. People who have bought cars post 2020 or am currently in the process of buying a car
3. Primary decision maker for the car purchase
{This project’s aim was to provide actionable insights for CDK’s CMS design concept — the CMS was updated post COVID to facilitate online purchases. Thus, we only interviewed customers who have bought cars/wish to buy cars post COVID (2020)}
We used open coding to classify different themes from our interview data. Here's a snapshot of the process on FigJam.
Based on our research data, it was clear that the user base was roughly split in between two archetypes. Thus, we identified two primary customer segments:
One of the major limitations that we had during our research was not being able to talk to dealers and make a direct comparison between what dealers expect their actions to do and how customers perceive/react to it. We also mostly interviewed people that bought cars in Austin, Texas, thus are not sure if our research is generalizable to the larger population.
If we had more time, I would love to conduct more research on areas such as comparing pre-covid to post-covid dealership behaviors and online versus in person dealership inquiries.
1. Research Plan
2. Screener Questions
3. Interview/Moderator Script