Blue Auto
Bringing a brand to life
My role
Lead product designer
Product vision and thinking
Brand identity workshops
Designed mobile and mobile website
My team
Product designer
Product managers
Software developers
Marketing manager
Co-founder and CEO
Timeline
Planning phase - 2months
Design phase - 3months
Background
Before Blue Auto, this product began as an innovation project called “Marketplace” - disconnected landing pages that generated leads for dealerships.
These web pages provide car shoppers with trade, credit or finance information that will help them down the car buying journey.
Blue Auto was a start-up under the AutoVerify company.
Marketplace was a disconnected experience - trade, credit and finance all had separate landing pages
Dealers wanted more valuable leads that converted - too many “fluffy leads”
Car shoppers had a lack of trust for the single landing pages - there was no brand trust
The Problem
Create a consumer facing brand that educates shoppers about the car buying process and generate high quality leads for dealerships.
The opportunity
Series of Brand Identity Workshops
Process & Planning
Timeline: 2 monthsSince this project was a new brand, I started the process by planning out a series of Brand Identity workshops from Logo Conception to Mission Statement to finally Wireframing.
We are a completely remote team, so I Ied and facilitated these workshops with the use of a virtual board - Whimsical! Each workshop had a different goal and involved different members of the team - we had Product Managers, other designers, Marketing and the CEO. I learned how to collaborate and communicate with different levels of the organization and improve my workshop facilitation skills.
Brand Identity Workshops
Logo Conception
To align on what the team thought Blue Auto would be, we aligned on our visual brand keywords by dot voting on which words resonated best with helping consumers buy cars online.
Calm, Simple, Compassionate and Dependable are some of the brand keywords we decided on. Thinking about these keywords, we asked the team to participate in Crazy8’s to sketch out logos. This was a fun activity that helped everyone get aligned on the brand’s goals.
Brand Identity Workshops
Mission Statement
We needed to understand how each of our tools (trade, credit, finance, loan calculator) were solving pain points for the consumer, dealers and the business.
Blue Auto helps make the car buying process easy and stress-free by educating shoppers and building their purchase confidence with personalized trade, credit, and financing information before they get to the dealership.
- first draft
Empathy Mapping & Problem statements
Brand Identity Workshops
Empathy Mapping to explore the pain points to uncover themes and develop concise problem statements
Map out how our tools and features can solve these pain points to come up with problem statements for both consumers and dealers
Messaging and Marketing Position
Brand Identity Workshops
We evaluated how well the Blue Auto solutions would solve each paint points for dealers and consumers. This helped us come up with our value props and our marketing position for our MVP.
The pain points we scored low on helped us identify areas we can iterate and improve on.
Mission and Vision
To empower people to make better decisions through the fusion of artificial intelligence and personal service
It was important for us to understand how we were reaching our vision while considering the consumer, dealer and the business. We will do this by:
• Simplicity and convenience for the consumer
• Higher-quality leads
• Future Proof the Dealer
Brand Identity Workshops
Website Architecture
After a clear understanding of our brand identity, I led a workshop to align on the website architecture and the content we needed to bridge the gap between consumer and business goals. We shared this with the CEO and the entire Blue Auto team for alignment before moving onto wireframing and designs!
Brand Identity Workshops
Wireframing
We used Crazy8’s to ideate on exactly how the website would function. A new feature that came out of these brand identity workshops was to combine our trade, credit, finance and loan calculator tools into one Report Summary. Consumers can come back to it to view their trade information and can stop anytime in this journey.
Flows
Website Architecture
Full website architecture Report Summary / Dashboard
Designs
Desktop and mobile designs of the Report Summary / Dashboard page. We allow users to use any of the car shopping tools to educate themselves before going to the dealership. As an MVP, we text a link to users so they can refer back to their reports at anytime.
Lessons learned
Creating Blue Auto was an amazing opportunity for me as a fairly junior designer at the time. I was able to lead workshops with higher level executives and non-designers. This helped me become confident in my communication skills, gain domain knowledge about the automotive industry and learn about the business side of product.
• Creating a brand - everything from logo conception to mission & vision and messaging
• Collaborate with different departments across the organization
• Running and facilitating design workshops with non-designers
• Learning how to communicate with stakeholders and higher level executives
Running effective workshops can be a powerful collaborative tool for any team! I continued to lead design workshops for my other projects.
Impact & Future
Blue Auto brand was launched, along with a standalone site which included a blog, about us page and tools
April 2021 -
All time high conversion rate of: 3.3%
A record 33 stores were on board
All-time high NPS score of 60 was reached
July 2021 -
The last month of Blue Auto’s lead generation service
A temporary version of the Blue Auto website still exists, along with the Blog and Youtube channel
https://blue.auto/
Aug 2021 -
Reason for closure
Although the team did continuously improve the quality of the leads (measured by conversion to sale), the quality was not high enough to justify raising the price of the leads, thus, making the venture unprofitable.
Product & Industry Takeaways
Shopper intent is extremely important - there was no vehicle attached to Blue Auto leads, they were not generated from a dealer website.
Many of our users did not realize that the Blue Auto tools would capture their information and have dealerships contact them, which contributed to the unwillingness of the end users to talk to the dealerships, which in turn reduced the quality of the leads in the eyes of the dealerships.