eBay motors
parts & accessories fitment

Shopping for parts & accessories online isn’t easy - people cannot quickly and reliably shop for parts compatible with their vehicle. Offline retailers like AutoZone have developed standards that made shopping much easier. You walk into an AutoZone and the employee in front would ask, “what kind of car do you have”? VS. Shopping online feels like walking into a shop with millions of items available with no help. That is why fitment is a core online feature. It provides an easy and consistent way to search for vehicle parts & accessories that fit your car.

The fitment experience ties all the other products/features within P&A together. Motors homepage, My Garage, Visual Diagram Shopping and Tire Installation all lead into or leverage fitment in their respective user flows. Fitment became the company’s top priority for 2 years and I was the lead designer during that time. Our main goal for 2 years was to improve overall experience.

2 YEAR PROJECT OVERVIEW

Improving discoverability will increase conversion. To dive deeper on discoverability, consistency, and value prop.

Platform: dWeb, mWeb, iOS & Android native apps

TEAM

1 designer, 2 PM, 1 content strategist,
4 frontend PD, 9 backend PD, 4 QE

ROLE

• Oversee E2E in all P&A features

• Lead brainstorming workshops

• Localize design for US, UK, DE

• Align all platforms (dWeb, mWeb, iOS, Android)

• Create seamless experience for multiple use cases and flows

I conducted a full day workshop and partnered with researchers to run 2 UER studies to understand our users problems. One of the research sessions was done in Germany.

OBJECTIVE

• Collect data to test the hypothesis

• Understand user behavior

• Find user pain points
  

FINDINGS

• Fitment is useful and easy to use but it's not noticed as 50% participants didn’t see it

• Value proposition isn't clear and users need more context - mistaken as an ad

• E2E experience needs to be more seamless - Inconsistency issue

• Germany experience needs to be more customized
  

DESIGN PLAN
The plan for fixing the fitment experience was split into two phases:

• Short-term - address discoverability and clarify value prop

• Long-term - fix bugs and update E2E consistency as a framework

OVERVIEW

Duration: 5 months to launch.
Fitment is useful and easy to use but it's not noticed.
Hypothesis: Improving discoverability will increase conversion.

CHALLENGE

Lack of data

To accommodate the short timeline, I discussed with different domain owners to find their success stories and explored ideas using existing UI elements. Based on reviews and previous studies, we selected 3 variants to user test on the desktop: Adding a tool tip, repeating fitment after x-number of item listings, and increasing its section on the top.
Tool tip received the most positive feedback which then was brought to review with the rest of core team on all use cases and flows with the content strategist.

CONCLUSION & Learnings

After conducting multiple rounds of user testing we finalized the design and opened it up to 10% of our users. Due to the flawless collaboration, we launched the tool tip feature on all platforms by Sep 2018 and finder completion jumped with stable conversion.

If there was more time, I would explore the worst use cases, where all new features are introduced together. Then I would collaborate with other stakeholders to create a hierarchy on signals/noise so we don’t overwhelm our users.