At CarMax, my main responsibility was discovering customer problems and designing solutions.

Along with my team core I have shipped multiple products that were beneficial for the customer and the business. Before we get to the final products, I want to explain the process of creating them.

I facilitated research along with my core team to create shared understanding and a design target.

As any good product designer knows, discovery cannot be done in a vacuum. Shared understanding and empathy for the customer can only happen when key team members do that discovery together.

When my core team (product designer, product manager and lead developer) was first formed we were given the Search Results Page as our product. Instead of assuming what the best design would be, we wanted to understand how customers were using search today and what their biggest problems were.

My most common form of discovery was holding 20 minute interviews with users of our website, often conducting multiple interviews per day.

After each interview we would then collaborate on Empathy Maps, taking note of what that customer was thinking, feeling, doing, and saying. We discussed the similarities between each customer until eventually we felt confident enough to create our Design Target.

Our Design Target, Taylor, was a first time, anxious car shopper.

We noticed a common pattern in our user interviews. A lot of the customers we talked to were stressed out. They didn’t know much about cars let alone the car shopping process. They craved validation through trusted advisors or online research.

Their biggest concern was making a bad decision.

We took the aggregate of these interviews and had our design target, Taylor. We set out to design products that would help Taylor become a more confident car shopper.

The Problem for Taylor

Taylor gets overwhelmed and fatigued by used car shopping. Every single car is unique and just on CarMax.com alone there are over 50,000 cars to look through. The cognitive overload of looking at several cars, remembering the details of those cars and deciding which cars best meet their needs is often too much. This causes Taylor to get discouraged and to stop shopping completely.

The Solutions I Designed

Over the years we have tested multiple products to solve Taylor’s problems. These are our most successful to date.