From Investment to Cost-Savings
Background
Cox’s Vehicle Inventory Platform (CVIP) export capability is set to go live in 2025, with the ambitious goal of becoming the primary inventory source for all Cox Automotive dealer and consumer solutions. The export capability presented a $1.3 million investment over 2 years with a projection of $3 million in cost-saving over 3 years by retiring redundant export capabilities (See Image A).
HCD Methods
Personas > Journey Mapping > Object Mapping > Wire-framing > Usability Testing > UI Design
The Challenge
As the lead UX Architect, I lead the product team through the tooling discovery effort. I faced a dual challenge: creating a functional and tolerable user experience while navigating the constraints of retrofitting legacy systems with new tools. The goal wasn’t perfection—it was to deliver an experience that met user needs well enough to unlock the business value of this investment, all while working with a Frankenstein-like amalgamation of old and new systems.
Problem Discovery
User Problem
Setting up exports required navigating five separate tools, creating inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Resolving issues often demanded hours of investigation and SME input, delaying resolution times for dealer customers. The Inventory Export Tool provided centralized tooling and a common language, speeding up the inventory set up workflow.
Target Users
Implementation Specialists work with dealers to import their inventory into the CVIP, set up exports to the Cox Products the dealer has purchased as well as third party sites such as Google Cars, Edmonds, Cars.com, etc.
Cox Products
Type: Beneficiary
Description:
Product and engineering teams who manage the individual CoxAuto products that receive the vehicle inventory exports.
Needs:
Unified vehicle data record system.
Consistent inventory import rules.
Consistent inventory import methods.
Business Value:
The project promises one centralized export capability and tooling, retiring redundant existing tools resulting in significant cost savings.
Dealer Customers
Type: Beneficiary
Description:
Sign up to provide their inventory data to CoxAuto so that it is made available in the products they purchase.
Needs:
Fast vehicle data issue resolution.
Consistent vehicle data across solutions.
Near real-time vehicle data updates.
Business Value:
Car shoppers view consistent and up to date vehicle data and representation across CoxAuto products.
Implementation Team
Type: Executor
Description:
Import vehicle data into CVIP and make it available to CoxAuto products through export setups by sourcing inventory from dealer customers.
Needs:
Streamlined export setup processes.
Ease of troubleshooting.
Minimize the tooling learning curve.
Business Value:
Streamlined export setup processes and minimal troubleshooting time.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The good news? We didn’t need to build the inventory export tool from scratch—the business strategically decided to adapt an existing legacy tool with added features, significantly cutting engineering costs. The bad news? This approach created a disjointed experience where users began in the legacy tool with one interface style and then transitioned to a new screen with an entirely different look and feel—far from seamless, *sneeze* the ugly.
Defining the Problem
The experience needed to be tolerable, not pretty. We were to create an efficient export setup experience for Implementation special.
How might we create a unified experience with legacy and new tooling so that it resulted in streamlined inventory export setups for Implementation Specialists?
Solution Discovery
Our Solution Discovery efforts centered on defining the Inventory Export Tool to shape the UI design. I led collaborative sessions to create a Journey Map and a UI Object Map, both tailored to the core workflow, "Setting up an Inventory Export.".
Documenting the Workflow
I crafted an assumed User Journey Map (See Image C) —a hypothesis rooted in prior research on export setup workflows. An Implementation Specialist from our discovery squad lent expertise, ensuring our approach aligned with real-world practices. This artifact was used to map user actions to API services, listing assumptions about the workflow, and helping form the UI to move the user forward in the process.
Image C - Shows a representation of the team’s best hypothesis to how the experience would work.
UI Object Mapping
The UI Object Map laid the groundwork for the design by providing a comprehensive reference of the components in the new and legacy UIs and their interconnections (See Image C).
Image C - UI Object Map detailing the components of the new and legacy UIs
Solution Definition
Usability Study
With an understanding of the UI components and user journey, I built a prototype to conduct a usability study with five participants familiar with export workflows. Participants completed scenario-based tasks, and each objective was graded based on success.
The overall grade was a B—meeting expectations without exceeding them, which aligned with the project’s objective of delivering a tolerable experience to build upon (See Image D).
Image D - This diagram demonstrates how well the participant met the necessary objective.
Friction Points
During the usability study, participants struggled to navigate between the legacy to the new UI tooling. This specific objective was given a grade D and called out as a risk. In the real experience this navigation issue could cause an unintentional closing of the tabs and thus breaking the workflow, forcing users to start from scratch. Too risky.
Outcome & Results
User Interface
The screens were converted to high fidelity, ensuring design system compliance.
Image D - High fidelity designs use as reference for development.
In conclusion, the CVIP export capability provided faster data flows for integrators and enhanced tooling for Implementation Specialists. Through a collaborative discovery process and validation with target users, we delivered a functional solution addressing key challenges, achieving $3 million in cost savings, and gaining critical buy-in from customer support leadership who now trusted its potential to drive efficiency.