C A R M A X
Shopping with your financing terms
Affectionally known as “SWYFT,” this product empowers customers to use the personal results of their financing pre-approval application to shop all cars within their budget.
Background
Customers long had the ability to submit an application & receive a pre-approved for an individual car OR a total dollar amount with CarMax. The dream of SWYFT was to use that same SINGULAR application to allow customers to shop ALL the cars in CarMax’s inventory. Our story starts when the results of a customer’s pre-approval application come back to them. They would find out if they were either “straight approved,” “declined” or “conditionally approved” through an email link to a stand alone webpage.
The first tests
Initially there was a simple test on this stand alone page that showed a few extra cars with their personalized terms on them, in addition to the individual car that they requested the pre-approval on. Just showing these few extra decisions on this page led to a 29% increase in hold or transfer leads. This test also provided a link BACK to the search experience where customers could see their personalized terms on even more tiles as they shopped
Initial Discovery
After doing some joint discovery sessions and observations from the original experiment, a few things were clear:
• Customers didn’t blink twice when they stumbled upon their terms on the search page. It was a no-brainer to keep building a more scaleable experience.
• There was no way for them to control monthly or down payment after initially choosing one in their application. You were stuck viewing limited terms.
• There was shallow budget guidance and limited context for user. The “green flags” were doing all the heavy lifting to signal to a customer that there was ever anything different.
• Those same “green flags” were also colliding with existing patterns inside the test
How would you describe this to a friend?
“I would say, this is a no hassle car buying website. All you need to know, all your numbers are right here. It’s already set up for you.”
Tile Design Process
The first experiment only really showed customers which cars they were “straight approved” for. With more flexibility coming later, a customer could get themselves into a space to see vehicles outside of their budget (“declined” or “conditioned” cars). Working with a visual designer on our internal design system team, we hashed out a lot of options.
We settled into some color rules as a group and then kept pushing it. We also took time to tweak language, and made conscious decisions to highlight the monthly payment, the most critical number with a customer’s terms. We also worked through some Google’s Core Web Vitals dynamics and accessibility constraints.
Final Tile Design
Tile Details
We gained a lot with the redesign of these tiles. First, rethinking them gave me more real estate to communicate terms, which was critical for large ranges of monthly payments or APRs. We also increased the surface area where customers could click to get more information. The entire colored bar was now a touch target instead of a small info ⓘ like before.
Best yet, one glance of the colors on the search page let, customers quickly interpret decisions. The “stop-light-esque” pattern to guides customers through their decisions without having to dive into the fine print right away.
In the new world, I made sure to account for all the NOT happy paths that could happen in search. We planned for what tiles looked like when the API breaks down and decisions won’t render, when a customers down payment is higher than the price of the car - meaning they wouldn’t NEED financing and what a “declined” car looks like.
These extra use cases took a lot of back and forth with copy and legal to iron out appropriate language.
Budget Filter Design Process
Another area that was important to this new SWYFT world (and where my search skills came into play) was the budget filter. Customers already had access to using a calculator filter within search page so there was some balance between existing design and assumptions of stakeholders.
A few “decisions” had been made before I joined the project on WHAT this area should look like and HOW it should behave. To sort it out, I first led a workshop where we laid out the technical SWYFT capabilities and had different folks draw out how they thought this area should work. We talked deeply through decisions and assumptions of each person to get at the heart of the job to be ton. I took away the sketches and narrowed in on the “MUST HAVES” and “NICE TO HAVES” and really sorted through simplifying it for a customer. The result was very minimal. I stripped out lots of the layers to distill down the filter to the two key elements customers needed: the Down Payment & Monthly Budget.
The Challenges
User Testing
Finance testing is truly unique. Customers have a very challenging time envisioning things in prototypes when the financing terms do not match their own to a T. User Testing could only get us so far in true gut reactions and directional work. The real discovery only happened once SWYFT was the hands of customers.
Legal
LEGAL! Phew. Language, supporting copy and just managing expectations with a legal financial group was a gigantic shift. We shifted to asynchronous approval on updates instead of meetings to get things out on time. Also balancing true LEGAL feedback with opinionated critique frequently needed to be weighed.
Tech
While mucking through discovery and design, tech had its own challenges that kept popping up. There were some different ways of approaching getting terms on our total inventory count that kept rearing its ugly head in meetings.. Working through communication challenges and pushing onward with unique personalities certainly stretched my leadership muscles.
The Results
After tweaks & testing we defined the control experience to default customers with their budget filter off, so customers could see all cars in inventory right away, including ones outside their budget. Through discovery & observation we learned that if we showed customers all the cars we had available, then they would back into a budget that was more in line with the current inventory and market.
Following the release of pre-qualification, CarMax began a marketing campaign to promote the ability to shop with your financing terms. Check out one of my favorites with Steph Curry and Candace Parker.
