Case Study - Simplifying car finance to build trust, improve accessibility and eliminate friction.
Car Finance Marketplace
Design of a car finance marketplace for one of India’s largest auto majors. This was a New Product Development exercise as no such service existed in the Indian market at the time.
Overview
The client is one of India’s largest auto majors, and was looking to simplify the car buying process for its customers. In a diverse country like India, with large variations in socioeconomic and digital literacy levels, the central challenge was identified to be quick and easy access to car finance for the broadest possible user profiles.
Car buyers have multiple choices when it comes to vehicle finance. However, in each of those cases they would have to navigate the varied and complex requirements for loan qualification, application and approval. The client wanted customers to be able to access finance and purchase a vehicle within minutes to hours, instead of the usual days and weeks.
Team
Principal Designer - me
Business strategy team
Client teams - business, marketing
Development partner team
My Role
UX Design
Design Research
Design Strategy
Prototyping
User Testing
Key Activities
Design research to identify opportunity
Design strategy for product-market fit
IA, UX, UI design and usability testing
Coordination with engineering, business, client, and development teams
Research
To understand the opportunity space, we conducted qualitative design research with 35 recent buyers and prospective customers across three geographic regions, and validated our findings through quantitative surveys with 2,600 more. Further user testing was conducted using prototypes during iterative design cycles.
Ethnographic Research
Direct observation - Fly-on-the-wall, ride-along and in-depth interview based design research to map out the workflows of key stakeholders - prospective customers and dealer sales executives.
In-depth interviews helped to delve deeper into stakeholder decision-making, motivations and emotions at various stages of their workflows.
“I can’t tell the difference between all the pricing and finance options - I feel like they’re only giving me the loan options that benefit them.”
Key Outcomes: Ability to map customer behaviour and gain insights on how to create positive shifts in brand perception.
Journeys and Systems Mapping, Personas
From multi-city ethnographic research, we created current reality journey maps for 4 key user archetypes. Journey mapping helps to identify pain points across all key stakeholders - customers, sales executives, dealers and others.
“The salesperson takes a long time to recalculate EMIs every time my requirements change.”
Key target personas were derived from the findings of the ethnographic research, across varying economic strata and digital awareness. We mapped key customer journeys against these personas, which helped the team better understand how to design for different perspectives and requirements.
The detailed customer journey maps of various stakeholders were layered with systems maps to identify potential areas for intervention and improvement. This also helped uncover patterns and dependencies between underlying systems and front-end experiences - which helped various teams problem-solve collaboratively.
Key Outcomes: Eliminating friction for all stakeholders, designing for customer delight.
Designing the target customer journey
We simplified the car finance process from 15 steps to 4 - enabled by new and redesigned supporting technology and finance processes.
Ideation Workshops
Four ideation workshops (immersion sessions) were conducted with client and partner stakeholders as well as the various project teams through the project. This helped to align findings and approaches, and to bring all perspectives to the table and design collaboratively.
Sample slides from the ideation workshops.
Problems
Our research identified 3 primary challenges faced by customers seeking vehicle finance (and a number of nuanced insights that informed the design).
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Customers had to navigate varying finance providers for car loans, each with their own qualifying, application, and approval procedures. This gets complicated and tiresome very fast.
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Our research showed the vast majority of our target customers had low trust in finance aggregators and preferred taking loans from their own banks, even if at a higher interest rate.
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In a market where convenience is a big part of the car-buying and decision-making process, there were no end-to-end car purchase workflows that gave customers the choice of accessing the best loan rates in the market.
Goals
The problems we identified helped define our North Star goals, validated in cycles of user testing of the prototypes, and qualitative in-depth-interviews with our target users. A mix of UX and Business goals, they provided a clear direction for the project teams, and helped align priorities with the client stakeholders.
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Car finance was the most stressful and unknown aspect of the car purchase journey. There was a clear need to deliver an easy and intuitive financing option to customers.
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By integrating a finance marketplace we could leverage the loyalty and trust in the client brand to encourage customers to complete their loan search and purchase on the same platform.
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By building a simplified car finance process right into the website, we could offer customers access to the best loan rates through the easiest and most intuitive car financing journey ever seen in India.
Opportunity
How might we deliver an end-to-end integrated and seamless vehicle purchase journey to emerging digital-first customers?
Approach
Repair and Reimagine
To deliver an unprecedented ease of access to vehicle finance, we needed to navigate its intricacies to simplify existing processes and create new and more efficient ones where needed.
Customer-driven process innovation
Using the voice of the customer - through our design research and iterative user testing - we were able to drive process innovations in car finance that compressed loan approval to a few minutes, and turn-around-time to a few hours.
Partnerships
We onboarded many of the major financial institution partners early on in the project, to get buy-in and to collaborate in simplifying processes.
Design Samples
Working within the existing design system, we created a Car Finance Marketplace that blended into the platform, and also brought refinements in usability and updated UX design patterns.
Integrations with the existing website
We identified key points in the user flow that would act as persuasive Calls To Action into the car finance workflow. This helped keep the overall browsing experience smooth and uncluttered, by only presenting car finance CTAs where and when relevant.
Key jump points included the vehicle model page and the vehicle personalization workflow, among others such as direct communications.
Information Architecture
To help customers navigate a new and unfamiliar service, we designed a simplified information architecture for the loan application workflow. There are three main zones on the screen - the top location selection zone, the navigation menu to the left, and the active zone in the middle.
The loan navigation menu was kept persistent to help users see the various stages in the loan process, and to easily navigate between them to make edits, should they change their minds at any time.
The location selection widget recedes on scrolling down to provide more screen real estate - and reappears on scrolling back up.
Contextual information
We designed loan offers in the table to carry contextual information and options - such as detailed loan information and the ability to customize the EMI schedule and down payment for individual loans - a feature requested by a large percentage of respondents.
Also seen here is the principle of transparency in effect - as we prompt the user about the impact on their CIBIL score when applying for multiple loans.
User-requested features
Our design research uncovered a number of pain points that helped inform the product strategy. One such functionality was the ability to filter loans according to Identity and address proof documents - a huge pain point for users from semi-urban to rural backgrounds whose documentation is often incomplete or not easily available at hand.
Assistive features
To maximize user adoption, we had to deliver feature enhancements that made using the platform intuitive and reduced the burden of accurate form filling - inaccuracies can lead to loan rejections and other issues down the line.
One such feature that we included was to autofill form fields using data from digitized documents such as PAN or Aadhaar cards, etc. Users have the ability to edit these fields in some cases, so there is always a degree of user control built in.
Impact
“***** Smart Finance” was launched within a few months of this project, as an online end-to-end real-time car financing service platform that offers pre-approved and custom loan offers from 16 financiers.
“Since its launch in December 2019, the company has disbursed Rs 15,000+ crores ($2 billion+) worth of loans to over 2.6 lakh customers.”
- financialexpress.com, October 2021.
“With the best car finance, financier and rate of interest, ***** Finance is definitely a one-stop shop when you are planning to buy a car.”
- bankbazaar.com
Key Business goals were met, that helped stave off emerging threats from finance companies entering into the car comparison and recommendation journey, among others.
