Overview.

Improve dealerships' efficiency

in accessing documents

My Role

While at CDK Global as a UX Designer, I revamped the document search feature as part of the company's platform modernization efforts.

The case study below shows how I conducted the end-to-end design process in the agile environment to significantly boost dealerships' efficiency of accessing documents through document search and overall user experience.

Team

1 Product Manager

1 Developer

1 Scrum Master

1 Design Manager

Timeline

Jun - Aug 2022

Background.

Automotive dealerships manage

business operations by CDK Platform

What’s CDK platform & Who’s user?

Dealerships manage their end-to-end business operations, including acquiring, selling, financing, insuring, repairing, and maintaining vehicles by CDK, a SaaS platform.

What’s document search?

Like how we get files from our own Google Drive, car dealerships can access documents related to car sales, including sales contracts, invoices, service records, warranty information, and more from the CDK platform.

Prompt.

Enhance document search usability

with new Design System, a part of roadmap

Why redesign document search?

CDK Global initiated developing and implementing a new design system in FY22 to modernize the current platform and improve the overall user experience. As part of the roadmap, the design team was needed to design a modernized single-page search application, which I was responsible for.

Research.

Understand users’ JTBDs and

identify usability issues accordingly

Conduct user research to learn why dealerships conduct document searches.

For the right design direction, I conducted secondary user research under the time & research limitations. After communicating with PM, I got the essential insights: dealerships have various departments and roles, but their document search process is basically the same and primarily aims to achieve two main goals:

Discover usability issues by UX heuristic evaluation.

After understanding users' JTBDs, I conducted a heuristic evaluation grounded in user research. I discovered that issues impacting user efficiency centered on the document locating and collection stages on the results page.

Define Problem.

Users get desired files inefficiently

by existing document search, because:

There are three problems in the process of users searching for documents to get the documents they need 👇

Design Goal & Metrics.

How might we revamp the document search to help users quickly required and collect their required files?

Reduce locating the needed files time

Measure the time it takes users to find the required documents. The design objective has been achieved if the time to locate the required documents is reduced.

Reduce collecting files time

Measure how long users collect (download/print) the required documents. The design objective has been achieved if the time it takes the user to gather the required documents is reduced.

Design Solution #1.

Highlight keywords for efficient scanning

and locating with more result items per page

For problem #1: Users hard to scan and locate result by overwhelming & uninformative metadata.

After consulting the design system, I opted for an accordion component in the updated version. This collapses information to present results more compactly and emphasizes keywords at the first level.

Because the size of the result items is smaller, more result items can be displayed per screen, and information can be conveyed more efficiently.

Design Solution #2.

Higher granularity filters

assist users in identifying file types

For problem #2: Users hard to distinguish required files by unclear filename.

Because users hard to identify file types due to unclear system-generated filenames, so firstly, I discussed with the developer the option of changing the filename to the same as the file type so that users could more easily identify the file type by the filename.

However, after discussions with the developer, it was confirmed that altering these names was unfeasible. So, I generated other ideas to solve the user problem and overcome the technical constraint.

Based on the document type code provided by the developer, I organized 12 categories with a total of 51 types of document types. I designed them as filters with submenu to make it easy for users to find the target file type.

Design Solution #3.

Bulk action instead of repeatedly

single actions for collecting files efficiently

For problem #3: Users can't quickly collect multiple files by repeatedly clicking the "Download" button.

To allow users to collect files efficiently, I provided action buttons for single and batch operations (download/print) on the results card and results page.

Users have the flexibility to act on single files or to easily group-select multiple files for batch actions, accommodating various scenarios like audit searches.

Design Validation.

Efficiency of users' access to documents

was significantly improved

By user testing, the new version of document search proves effective✌️.

🎉 Phew~ You made it!