Project Overview
The carsales app provides the tools to help users buy and sell cars with confidence. Users can search over 200,000 new and used cars, compare vehicle makes and models, access their member centre and list their car straight from any mobile device with Snap n’ Sell. With over 3 million downloads and such a breadth of features and functionality, the carsales app receives an exceptional 5 star rating from the Apple app store and 4.5 stars from Google play.
Organisation
Team
Carsales UX/UI Team, Native Apps Team and Cars Stream.
Project Brief
Carsales is the No1 destination for Australians when buying and selling a car. Being the leading automotive online classifieds, our challenge was to align the user experience strategy with new and emerging customer needs.
Utilising specific channels to capture customer feedback, we identified areas where we could improve and enhance the app. From this insight we were able to establish the following business and user requirements:
• Consistent Carsales Experience
• Design & development Efficiency
• Increase application performance
• Support for different behaviors
Project Need
Carsales.com.au has been Australia’s leading automotive classifieds website for many years. Recently, there has been significant growth in mobile usage, making this an extremely important aspect of our business.
With this growth has come the expectation from our customers that, regardless of which device or platform they are using, the experience they have is unified and consistent.
This expectation has made it imperative that the business takes a holistic view of its customer’s interaction points – Desktop, Mobile and Native App (iOS, Android and Windows phone). The carsales unified experience strategy has been put in place to deliver on this need.
Multi-select search was a key feature that was demanded by our users, this allows buyers to select and search by multiple makes and models in a single instance. The ability to achieve this functionality and deliver a lighting fast mobile experience was achieved through our own in-house technology Ryvus IQ.
User Experience
Great customer experience is the foundation of carsales.com.au’s product and service strategy. It plays a large part in how a brand is perceived, and this perception leads to an experience that is highly personal. A unified experience has to be created around a customer’s needs, preferences, objectives and context. We have focused heavily on crafting an experience that matches content, functionality and a coherent brand personality across various touch points to deliver on the user’s expectations.
Ensuring that our experience is not limited to specific mobile technology, our idea was to create a carsales experience map, which can be applied regardless of the device or platform. Throughout multiple iterations, products get stripped down from seemingly large and complex tasks to simple efficient pleasurable experiences.
The carsales Windows’s app was the first to implement a cohesive experience design language, the same strategy was then applied to our Android app. The “Help me to choose” feature is a glowing example of the carsales unified design strategy. The holistic approach and execution of this feature across all platforms, ensures that regardless of the user’s device preference, they receive a consistent and seamless experience, whilst leveraging subtle attributes of the particular device to deliver on the user’s expectations.
The unified design experience has shown remarkable and consistent results across our mobile platforms, the carsales app receives constant 5 star user reviews on the Apple app store and Google play.
Project Marketing
Mobile is embedded in our DNA at carsales and is core to our consumer messaging, both online and offline. Promotion of our mobile platforms was heavily supported by our latest consumer TVC campaign. This campaign promoted the simplicity and power of our mobile platforms, highlighting a number of new site and app features and emphasising the overall ease of use. To further support this, mobile imagery featured in our out-of-home and print advertising executions nationally. During our app development, we closely monitored user feedback via our social and app channels and used these valuable insights to improve the mobile experience for our customers. Our Android app was rolled out initially through a Google+ beta community, with great interaction directly between our team of developers and consumers.
Project Privacy
Privacy is critically important to carsales. We recognise the importance of being transparent and open with our customers in regards to how we collect and use their personal data. Links to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy are easily accessible in both the apps and mobile website.
Best Mobile Expanded Service or Application
This category recognises the best expanded mobile service or application.
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