TrueCar

Identity Design
Growth Marketing
Product Design
User Experience

When an automotive tech company reimagines the car buying process, it also reinvents itself. That means rebranding, repositioning, and rebuilding a digital marketplace that shakes up the industry. When I joined TrueCar, I was part of the Brand Creative Team. Our crew worked closely with Pentagram New York to build a complete rebrand. This effort impacted every area of the business. What started as a large effort for identity work, quickly turned into a job where I worked on many aspects of the user journey. From point of discovery to point of sale. We created a modern brand, and a platform where users can shop with ease. Simply put, this is car buying made easy.

Forming a new identity is a major step for a business, and it sets the stage for new opportunity. The challenge with rebranding is familiarizing consumers with the new identity, while simultaneously driving traffic to promote company growth. How can we encourage consumers to visit the platform and explore further? The solution is developing creative strategy for omnichannel marketing. I designed media campaigns, paid social creative, and display advertisements that allowed TrueCar to expand it’s presence, and reel in more shoppers. The more we expose consumers to TrueCar, the more opportunities we have to drive engagement and increase conversions.

This effort proved to be very fruitful. After my team refreshed these assets and created scalable media with the Growth Team, TrueCar saw a 12% brand lift with programmatic ads after only 2 months. Typically, a brand lift is successful if a company sees this metric above 4% in a single quarter, and we managed to get 3 times that amount in half the time. This was a true testament to the business impact of good design.

I was always a firm believer that the user journey starts at the first touch point. When I was developing ad campaigns for TrueCar, I realized that for the consumer, ads were often the first step in shopping for a car. I wanted to be more involved with the process that happens after click-through. So I started working on the Product Design Team, not only to help cross-functional teams become more aligned, but also so I could help improve the end-to-end experience. The general objective on this team was to increase platform traffic and generate more leads on vehicles, which is vital for success at TrueCar. We also have a responsibility to solve user problems and reduce user pain points. After reviewing engagement data from platform analytics and conducting user research, the team determined that engagement was down across several areas of the platform. We also had consistent user feedback that proved there were not enough tools to help user in the car-buying process. So the Product Team developed new strategies that revolved around the TrueCar home page.

The home page required a large cross-functional effort between Product Design, Engineering, and Brand Strategy. We completely redesigned this page to make the experience more engaging. In this space, we provided users with essential tools they need to feel confident in their car-buying journey. This included key features like financing tools, vehicle fit quizzes, and trade-in options. We also created more avenues for them to move down the funnel like shopping by brand, special incentives, and more. Once we built a functional MVP with Engineering, we launched A/B testing to see what insights we could find. After 1 month of testing, the new homepage had a 3.6% increase in overall engagement compared to the previous page. Heat mapping data also showed an increase in engagement and longer visits below the fold, which was an area we experienced significant drop off with the previous design.

Vehicle Detail Pages

In addition to the large group efforts of Product and Engineering, I also operated on a smaller cross-functional team that focused specifically on designing vehicle detail pages. These pages were dense with vehicle information and functional components. Because of this, these pages came with extensive requirements. Not only did we need to effectively organize vehicle information that was syndicated from dealerships all over the country, but we also needed to prioritize business goals and find innovative ways to capture leads. Working with Product Leadership, we were able to build information hierarchy that helped us organize and design all the vehicle information. I also built a library of custom icons that served as visual language for the most important vehicle details. These would eventually become core icons for the TrueCar platform. We organized the vehicle information in a way that could be scaled across all listings and represent each vehicle effectively.

With the vehicle information sorted, we still needed to focus on business goals. Ultimately these pages need to generate leads. How can we find new ways to get the user through the funnel and convert? Conducting user research and testing helped us determine one of the biggest areas of opportunity for more leads was pricing. We had an overwhelming response from users that pricing is the most important detail that helps them decide if they want to move forward. But the problem was that we had a range of prices and incentives that could apply to a vehicle. So the solution from this team was to build a dynamic pricing block. Creating a component that can cover the different types of pricing was a great way for us to consider all users, and reduce pain points for the experience. It also allows users to consider options if they are unsure how they want to proceed.

With the introduction of new information hierarchy and dynamic pricing components, as well as new modules that provide various incentive options, this updated experience allows users to have full transparency about a vehicle, so they can feel empowered to make the right decision as a consumer.