The Good, the Bad, the Tolerable
When dealers purchase Cox Automotive solutions, Implementation Specialists import their inventory data into the Cox Vehicle Inventory Platform (CVIP), which powers their products like AutoTrader, Kelly Blue Book, and Dealer.com. However, each product handles data differently, forcing specialists to manage fragmented export setups—a slow, error-prone process. To address this, Cox aimed to pilot a unified export tool within six months, positioning CVIP as the enterprise-wide solution for all inventory export feeds. But two major obstacles risked user adoption and a disjointed experience.
Core Team:
> Product Director
> Principal Architect
> Lead Engineer
> UX Architect
Process Overview:
> User Personas
> Journey Mapping
> Object Mapping
> Wire-Framing
> Usability Testing
> UI Design
The Challenge
As the lead UX Architect, I was tasked with leading the team through the research and design phase. Facing the challenge of creating a functional and tolerable user experience that mixed of legacy and new UI. The goal wasn’t perfection—it was to deliver an experience that meet user needs well enough to unlock the business value of the pilot.
Problem Discovery
I conducted stakeholder and subject matter expert (SME) interviews then co-synthesized with the team to identify the benefiting parties, a critical pain point, a key insight and two unexpected hurdles: a disjointed experience and user adoption hesitancy.
Solution Benefiting Parties:
Implementation Team
Source and setup vehicle data imports into CVIP and make it available to CoxAuto and 3rd party vendor products through export setups.
Pain Points:
- Setting up exports takes too many steps, too many systems.
- Waste hours digging through logs instead of fixing the problem fast.
- Every tool works differently. New hires take months to get up to speed.
Business Value:
Streamlined export setup processes and minimal troubleshooting time.
Exports feel like solving a puzzle when dealers need speed, not headaches.
– Sr. Implementation Specialist
Dealer Customers
Own multiple CoxAuto dealer solutions and benefit from near-real-time and accurate vehicle data availability.
Pain Points:
- Slow issue resolution delays sales and frustrates dealers.
- Inconsistent data across platforms confuses customers and hurts trust.
- Delayed updates mean missed sales opportunities.
Business Value:
Car shoppers view consistent and up to date vehicle data and representation across CoxAuto products.
Outdated inventory costs me sales. By the time errors get fixed, the customer’s gone.
– Frustrated Dealer
Cox Dealer Solutions
Product leaders who manage the individual CoxAuto products, relying, on vehicle inventory from CVIP, and benefit from the export capability.
Pain Points:
- Juggling multiple tools to track data issues wastes time and creates errors.
- Inconsistent import rules force manual adjustments, slowing down workflows.
- Various import methods adds complexity and frustration.
Business Value:
The project promises one centralized export capability and tooling, retiring redundant existing tools resulting in significant cost savings.
Fragmented data systems make me nervous about missing critical updates
– Dealer.com Product Leader
Key Findings
Critical Pain Point
Implementation Specialists wasted hours navigating disconnected tools, often requiring engineering intervention to resolve issues. Delaying resolution time for dealer customers.
Revealing Insight
The Inventory Export Tool provided centralized and cohesive tooling, creating a common operational language and speeding up the export set up workflow.
Disjointed User Experience
To speed up delivery and reduce on costs, the business decided that the export tool would be based on a legacy tool with new screens. Requiring users to transition between completely different interface designs.
User Adoption Hesitancy
Implementation Specialists worried that learning a new tool and workflow would require more effort to set up exports risk their contractual service level agreements (SLAs).
How might we create a unified experience with legacy and new tooling so that it results in streamlined inventory export setup for Implementation Specialists?
The experience needed to be tolerable, not pretty. We were to create an efficient export setup experience for Implementation special.
Solution Discovery
I designed and facilitated interactive workshops with the team and an Implementation Specialist, who lent their expertise. Ensuring our approach aligned with real-world practices. Resulting a shared understanding via the co-creation of artifacts tailored to the core workflow, “Setting up an Inventory Export”.
Journey Mapping
By mapping every step of the export workflow—and aligning actions with their corresponding interfaces—we proved a key insight: While the tool’s UI changed, the core tasks remained the same. This helped ease user anxiety about learning “new” processes (See Image A).
Object UI Mapping
Co-developed alongside users through hands-on workshops, we collectively mapped every component across legacy and new systems. This shared visualization didn’t just document UI elements – it created a common language between designers and the users who would ultimately depend on these interfaces daily (See Image B).
Solution Definition
After presenting research insights to leadership and a broader group of Implementation Specialists, we secured unanimous buy-in to proceed with solution development. This endorsement validated our findings while ensuring organizational alignment before investing in design.
Wireframing the Workflow
I translated the workflow and UI components into low-fidelity wireframes that served as our battleground for stress-testing the hybrid UI with Implementation Specialists. (See Image C).
Workflow Testing
I built a prototype to conduct a usability test with five participants familiar with export workflows. Participants completed scenario-based tasks, and each objective was graded based on success. (See Image D).
Outcome & Results
The overall Usability Test was given a B—meeting expectations without exceeding them, which aligned with the project’s objective of delivering a tolerable experience to build upon.
Friction Points
During the usability study, participants struggled to navigate between the legacy to the new UI tooling. That 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.
Adjustments
Through close collaboration with engineering, we eliminated disruptive tab switching by implementing page refreshes instead. This solution required unplanned investment in legacy screen updates – not our ideal approach, but a necessary compromise to protect Implementation Specialists’ core workflows from disruption.
Key Takeaways
Manage Expectation
–
A Frankenstein UI is more digestible to stakeholders when paired with the benefits of speed and cost-savings.
Collaboration Wins Buy-In
–
Bringing along the core team and users reduced friction in the project progress and created a sense of ownership. Helping defend experience decisions.
Advocacy Requires Data
–
Requesting additional investment in a legacy system is already an uphill battle but the usability study brought user voice front stage.
