Unified Reporting Tools - Cox Automotive

Automotive dealerships rely on complex reports to track performance at both individual store levels 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 was to ensure these dealerships had the insights they needed—when they needed them—to make informed business decisions efficiently.

Introduction

Cox Automotive provides a range of digital tools to help dealerships manage their sales, inventory, and analytics. But their reporting systems were scattered across multiple platforms, making it frustrating for users to get the insights they needed.

  • Dealership staff had to jump between different tools, each with its own reporting format and data structure.

  • Inconsistent data presentation made it hard to compare performance metrics and make informed decisions.

  • Reports lacked flexibility, so users couldn’t customize them to fit their specific needs.

This meant dealerships were spending more time piecing together reports and less time actually using the data to drive their business forward. The challenge was to create a unified reporting experience—one that brought all the data together in a clear, consistent, and easy-to-use format, helping users find the right insights faster and with less hassle.

Before

After

Role: Lead UX Architect
Responsibilities:

  • UX Product Discovery

  • UX Strategy

  • Interaction Design/Prototyping

  • Visual Design

Company: FixedOps, Cox Automotive

Product Design Kick-Off

We began with a kickoff meeting alongside our product owners, utilizing Human-Centered Design (HCD) exercises to define the problems we aimed to solve and identify knowledge gaps. We also mapped out key stakeholders, overlapping products, teams, and project timelines. My role was to guide the team through UX processes and facilitate HCD exercises as needed

Discovering and Defining the Problem

We initiated our process with a Lean Canvas framework. Collaborating with product owners, we made assumptions, identified known and unknown factors, and established expected revenue metrics and estimated timelines

User Research

Once knowledge gaps were identified, we focused on validating our assumptions and gathering additional insights. Working closely with my product and UX partners, we developed an action plan.

The first phase of our Double Diamond approach involved assigning each squad member a research task with a set deadline. After gathering data, we reconvened to discuss findings and determine the next steps.

Research Action Items

  • Distill insights from initial findings.

  • Identify key stakeholders.

  • Conduct surveys and interviews with stakeholders.

  • Develop structured interview questions.

  • Utilize Rose, Thorn, Bud methodology to analyze successes, challenges, and opportunities.

  • Define next steps based on collected insights.

User Interviews & Analysis

Affinity Clustering

After conducting interviews, we performed affinity clustering with our partners to categorize insights and identify recurring themes.

Problem Analysis Tree

Using stakeholder insights, we developed a Problem Tree Analysis for several affinity clusters. This exercise helped us understand major pain points, their root causes, and their potential effects.

Key Insights

  • Too many tools, too much hassle.

  • Reports weren’t flexible enough.

  • Real-time insights were missing.

  • Mobile reporting was almost unusable.

Next Steps - Defining the MVP

With budget and time constraints, we needed to prioritize impactful solutions. Through HCD exercises, we conducted a brainstorming session using sticky notes to generate improvement ideas. We then categorized them using an Importance/Difficulty Matrix and held a voting session to determine key priorities.

MVP Priorities:

  • Create a unified and consistent navigation structure for all reporting tools.

  • Integrate existing dashboards and reports into a single, cohesive tool.

  • Develop a primary-use-case dashboard to enhance user experience.

  • Align the design with the Cox Automotive Design System for consistency.

Engaging our engineering and cross-platform partners early ensured feasibility and alignment across teams.

Design Approach

Design Sprints, Iteration, and Refinement

  • Work across multiple domains, identify the challenges, prototype and test our prototypes.

  • Address technical constraints and optimize performance.

  • Conduct additional stakeholder reviews to ensure business goals are met.

  • Initial Questions

    • How do our reporting tools fit within a scalable global product navigation and what impact does this have across multiple products?

    • Do we have leniency to explore ideas within our ecosystem? What does that look like?

    • What are our reporting tools lifecycle?

Milestones and our approach

Global Navigation Exploration

Global Nav Across Products

Updated Authentication & Questions

Global Nav Across Products

Global Nav Across Products

Usability Studies

My product partners and I set out to create a prototype and interview questions for our dealership partners.

  • Find stakeholders for our use case.

  • Create a prototype with a left hand vs top nav.

  • Create interview questions for the study.

  • Regroup.

Interviewing stakeholders as they use the reporting prototype

Insights

We found that our existing suit of reporting tools had flyout menus from both left and right of the screen with filter bars at the top and popup ranges within dashboards.

Left hand navigation was not going to work for our users.

With this in mind, we met with our design partners across the group of products to distill our findings.

The broader group had to rethink how navigation impacted all tools across all domains and what options we had.

For now, we put the project on hold until we knew more about upcoming changes in our product catalog.

Solution & Features

After collaborating with the broader team, my product partners and I set out to:

  • Explore navigation ideas for our reporting tools

  • Explore dashboard options and update the designs to include our design system

Design Iterations

Navigation Iterations

Final Designs - Dashboard

Final Designs - Sales

Implementation and Development

  • Collaborate with engineering teams to begin front-end and back-end integration.

  • Ensure alignment with the Cox Automotive Design System.

  • Develop prototypes and conduct usability testing with dealership stakeholders.

Design Specifications

Interactive Prototype Menu

Deployment and Evaluation

  • Gradual rollout of the unified reporting tool across pilot dealerships.

  • Monitor user adoption and collect performance metrics.

  • Plan for future enhancements based on continuous user feedback.

Challenges & How We Overcame Them

  • Stakeholder alignment – Getting buy-in from different teams.

  • Data integration complexity – Unifying multiple data sources.

  • Balancing flexibility & simplicity – Ensuring customization without overwhelming users.

Impact & Results

  • Time saved – Reduced time spent generating and consolidating reports by 17%.

  • Higher engagement – Increased adoption across dealership staff by 7%.

  • Improved decision-making – We learned through surveys that dealerships experienced faster insights leading to better business choices.

  • User feedback – Positive reception from dealerships and stakeholders.

Key Learnings & Takeaways

  • The importance of user research to uncover hidden pain points.

  • The value of iteration & testing to refine solutions effectively.

  • How cross-functional collaboration helps overcome complex challenges.

Final Thoughts

This project completely changed the way dealerships access and use their data. What was once a frustrating, disjointed experience across multiple tools became a simple, unified reporting system that makes it easier to find and act on key insights. By listening to users, understanding their biggest pain points, and focusing on clarity and usability, we built a tool that saves time, reduces confusion, and helps dealerships make smarter decisions.

Looking ahead, there’s still plenty of opportunity to take this even further—exploring things like AI-driven insights, deeper customization, and even smarter data visualization. But for now, this project proved that great design isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about making people’s lives easier.

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