Unified Reporting Tools - Cox Automotive
Automotive dealerships depend on complex reports to track performance at both the individual store level and across their entire network. With Cox Automotive supporting over 6,000 dealership locations, delivering accurate, timely, and easily comparable data is essential. Our goal is to ensure these dealerships have the insights they need—when they need them—to make informed business decisions efficiently.
Role:
Lead UX Architect
Responsibilities:
UX Research
Product Strategy
Information Architecture
Interaction Design/Prototyping
Visual Design
Company:
FixedOps, Cox Automotive
Overview
Unified reporting tools are dealer-facing solutions built as part of the FixedOps platform. The goal of these tools is to enhance dealership reporting for various roles, with a primary focus on FixedOps managers.
Challenges
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Cox Automotive’s initiatives for 2023 were to expand there unified experience across the technological ecosystem. Additionally new tools had to be built and old ones had to be updated and integrated.
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With multiple teams comes a set of challenges including touch points into other verticals within the suit of software tools at Cox Automotive.
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Because our group of dealerships were not only massive, but also located around the United States, we had to find creative ways to interview our primary users.
Product Design Kick-Off
Our kick-off started with our product owners where we used LUMA exercises to identify what we were trying to solve as well as where our gaps in knowledge lied. We then identified the stakeholders, overlapping products and teams as well as what our times lines looked like. My role was focused on UX and guiding the team with LUMA exercises when needed.
Our particular brand of development includes, LUMA and lean canvas with Agile to manage our deliverables and timelines.
Diamond One – Discovering and Defining the Problem
Most of our projects start with a our version of Lean Canvas. Working with product owners, we made assumptions and identified what we knew and what we needed to find out along with any expected revenue metrics and our estimated timelines.
UX Research
Once we identified where our gaps in knowledge lied we set out to validate whether or not we were following the right problems and to gather additional information.
Working with my product partners and my UX partner, we started with our plan of action.
Our first item in the double diamond was to assign each squad member a task and then report back within a set timeline. After converging, we discussed what we had discovered and where we need to go next.
Some of these action items looked like this:
Distill our insights
Identify stakeholders
Gather information from stakeholders through surveys and interviews
Develop interview questions
Use Rose, Thorn, Bud to identify things that are working, what’s not working and where we see potential
Determine next steps
User Interviews
Affinity Clustering
After the each interview we performed an affinity clustering with our partners.
Problem Analysis Tree
Taking what we knew about our stakeholders, we gathered together and built a problem tree analysis for several of the affinity clusters. This exercised helped us understand the bigger pain points from our stakeholders, the root cause, what might be the effects of this problem.
