Monthly payment calculator for used car shoppers
Timeline
2 months (Apr 2022)
My Role
I led research, interaction and visual design. I collaborated with a researcher on research strategy as well as another designer on discovery and early concepts. I worked closely with engineers on delivery plan and visual QA.
Context
Deliverables
Vroom is an online used car dealership offering a hassle-free shopping process. It had acquired an auto lender service specializing in subprime loans to serve a wider range of customers with more competitive terms.
With previous knowledge working on lower funnel financing and payment flows, I joined the team to explore strategic conversion opportunities in the upper funnel.
I designed a new calculator feature helping prospective customer identify and qualify for the loan terms that works for their budget.
I led kickoff and brainstorming workshop to align the cross-functional team on project objectives and scope.
I conducted 5 interviews + concept tests to understand car shoppers’ decision-making process.
I handed off final prototypes and specs to the engineering team.
Impact
This feature streamlines Vroom’s in-house financing, driving conversion, GPPU, and approval rates. A flexible calculator empowers prospective customers to explore 'what-if' scenarios, know what to expect, and feel confident in their financial decisions. By aligning terms with individual budgets early on, it also helps more customers qualify for financing that works for them.
Shoppers lacked transparency in the financing process
From previous research, we had identified a key frustration:
Online car shoppers need full understanding of their terms and monthly payment, before committing to applying for a loan.
Making what’s likely their biggest ever online purchase felt rightfully anxious. The lack of capability to do so causing Vroom to lose customers to traditional financial institutions and dealerships.
“I’m still left with entirely too many questions for my liking. Like, I don’t know if Vroom is going to let me rock with a $300 down.
Maybe I fall head over heels with this car but I still don’t know… what am I going to be looking at as far as monthly payment.”
Subprime shoppers often had more limited loan options. When they do get approved, they are often faced with terms that wouldn’t work for their financial situation.
HMW help subprime shoppers obtain loans that fit both their budget and their car needs?
Subprime shoppers are less likely to get approved for or accept a loan
Journey Map before & during Vroom shopping process
Brainstorming for unknowns and opportunities
I led the initial kickoff with PM, Engineering, QA, and UXR to review previous research findings and discuss what we still needed to understand about user motivation and behavior and what data needed to be collected.
Cross-functional design workshop generated both short- and long-term ideas.
Evaluating all the ideas, introducing monthly payment earlier in the customer journey would be the first step to enabling other more proactive features, the most low-cost to build, and the most industry standard.
Considering technical feasibility and complexity, this feature would be first placed on the Product Detail Page (PDP). This would provide the most immediate value to shoppers by allowing them to structure their loans for each car. We could also start improving car recommendations with budget data.
Developing the concept
Key design principles:
Convention. The interaction pattern and input fields should be familiar with other common loan calculators.
Clarity. There’s a lot of numbers to crunch here, so the visual hierarchy must facilitate easy understanding of the purposes of the fees.
Scalability. The components and patterns should be reusable for the next phases.
Iteration #1
The visualization in percentage wasn’t quite valuable and we’d run out of colors quickly.
Iteration #2
Added a receipt-style price breakdown to answer ‘what am I paying for?’.
The widget placement could get lost in all other important car info on the page and add to the cognitive load.
Iteration #3
A side drawer on desktop/tablet and bottom sheet on mobile. Can eventually evolve into a “cart” feature with stronger budgeting capabilities, where shoppers could also consider for protection products, insurance, gas, and so on.
Iteration 4/synthesized test concept
After getting early feedback on feasibility from engineering and critique from the design team, I built a prototype to get feedback from users.
How shoppers make all the decisions
Through a combination of interview questions, card sorting exercise, and concept testing with subprime car shoppers, I learned that they were well aware of their credit limitations. But these limitations wouldn’t prevent them from buying a car or getting qualified; they were just more motivated to consider tradeoffs. For example, they might choose a less expensive car and shorter term length to pay off the loan more quickly with a higher monthly payment.
The added anxiety of making all the decisions without actually seeing or test driving make buying a car even more challenging than it already is.
These insights validated our assumptions and supported strategic planning for a more confident subprime buying experience.
“It’s like playing the slot machine.”
I asked participants to rank decisions factors by importance, and how these would change if they were on a tighter budget.
Handoff
I moved forward with the side drawer/bottom sheet interaction pattern for the positive feedback from shoppers, prominent placement and ease of access on the page, and feasibility.
I worked with product, engineering and legal to consider business objecives, document edge cases, and ensure compliance in the final deliverable.
A/B testing
The feature was planed to be released as an A/B test. We hypothesized that shoppers with this tool would be more likely to get personalized financing results through pre-qualification and eventually start purchase.
A few other UX metrics I planned to track were:
Engagement: Are shoppers using this feature? How much time do they spend on it?
Adoption: Are shoppers returning to this feature over multiple sessions?
NPS: Are customers saying this feature is helpful/enjoyable?
Click map: Which elements are shoppers interacting with the most? Any rage or dead clicks?
Future work: Filtering by monthly payment
Research showed that there was a strong need for monthly payment filters to increase efficiency and relevancy of the search. I considered two levels of customizability for a phased release approach.
I explored ways to leverage the new calculator feature as well as using representative/predicted presets to balance backend load.
Reflections
This project was a reminder of the power of research and user context. It’d be risky for us to make assumptions about the subprime population without knowing their circumstances and the power they hold in their financial decisions regardless of their credit score.
I learned a lot about bringing a feature 0-1 in a fast-moving startup environment, negotiating stakeholder needs and exercising good judgement of when to switch up the process, when to make a compromise, and when to push back.