Background
Wheel Wish was a short-lived start up that aimed to simplify the car-buying process by allowing customers to set their own price and have dealers compete to meet their offer. I played a pivotal role in crafting user interface concepts for the initial pitch to secure funding. This experience involved mobile design and creating layouts using a design system.
I've included this project because it allowed me to hone my skills in working frugally and with constraints. There was no budget! It marked my introduction to the atomic design process, a method I've since adapted to my work. I've found this systematic approach invaluable in managing patterns and elements across complex products.
Discovery and Research
The start up faced a lot of challenges. No budget and a short deadline. When I came onboard they already had some early interface design concepts but the owner wasn't satisfied with them. Research was unfortunately limited. We did have industry experts to consult with and I relied heavily on them to understand the customer needs and best practices in short amount of time. I took an action-oriented approach and figured the best use of my limited time and resources would be to delve into comparable car buying experiences. I looked at all the top apps and site to reverse engineer how they solve shared user jobs.
Exploration
Wheel Wish had two distinct user types: car buyers and dealership personnel. I used Trello to create user journey maps for both the customer and dealership. This helped me see at which points the two users interacted. This approach allowed for swift progress and straightforward sharing with stakeholders. There are more task specific tools than Trello (like Figma's FigJam) but, with no budget, I was trying to think outside the box.
Conclusion
If I had the opportunity to do this again, I would approach some things differently. I would take a more hands-on, guerrilla-style approach to research, rather than relying solely on team members who were industry experts. I could directly approach local dealerships with surveys to uncover pain points in the selling process. I also realize that I should have been more assertive in challenging certain decisions that didn't seem effective to me and held my team members more accountable for their commitments. These adjustments probably wouldn't changed the outcome, but I consider the experience and insight a valuable learning opportunity. In the world of Jiu Jitsu, there's a saying I often recall: "You either win or you learn."
Regrettably, Wheel Wish didn't get off the ground, and I failed to back up my work on my local machine before losing access to it on the cloud. However, I managed to retrieve some early work that provides a sense of the project's direction. Here are a few screens from that initial process.
