Transforming Dealership Efficiency

Introduction

About Tekion

Tekion is a leading technology company changing the automotive retail industry with its cloud-based platform, Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC). Tekion’s goal is to connect and improve all parts of the automotive retail business. It provides a complete set of tools that combine DMS, CRM, digital retail, analytics, and more into one system. Tekion helps car dealers improve their sales, service, parts, and accounting processes, making their operations more efficient and profitable.

What does Tekion offer

Tekion offers a wide variety of products to its customers. The target customers for Tekion are car dealerships and OEM across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Even though Tekion offers a wide variety of products, the key ones are Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC), Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC), and Automotive Platform Cloud (APC).

Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC)

Tekion ARC DMS (Dealer Management System) is a cloud-based platform that helps car dealerships run more efficiently. It combines sales, service, parts, and customer management into one system. it provides real-time insights and automates tasks, making it easier for dealerships to serve customers and improve operations.

Problem/Objective(Hypothesis)

So I work in the parts module, which consists of different sub-modules like Sales Order, Purchase Order, Parts & Inventory, etc. The sub-module that I handle in parts is Purchase Order. Purchase Order is a sub-module in ARC DMS that creates various purchase order documents for a dealership. It has been the same since ARC launched. This is when the team realized that it’s time to give a fresh face to the purchase order module.

To begin with, like every other design-led project, we started with the design audit process. Instead of the usual heuristic evaluation process, we went through the entire purchase order document creation flow multiple times and noted all the issues from visual, experience, and flow perspectives. Also, we browsed through the issues people are complaining about through Subreddits. Below are the major problems we tried to solve through this revamp project.

1. Increase the purchase order document creation speed

In the current system, the time taken to create the purchase order document is too long in terms of the number of steps involved in creating the document as well as from a backend architecture perspective.

2. Reduce all the unwanted data on PO creation

In the current interface, there is unnecessary data that not all users need all the time. The data that needs to be displayed should be controlled accordingly.

3. Reduce the no. of document creation

One of the major issues with the current flow is that there are multiple entry points for different types of purchase orders that the user can create. The UI remains the same for all the documents; only the user input fields change. So, the objective was to unify the different PO document creation processes into a single flow using the progressive disclosure method.

4. Unify the 2 sub-modules together

In the current workflow, creating purchase orders and receiving parts belong to two different modules. Merging these will make the entire process smoother, as it will be easier to track the entire journey within a single module.

5. Accessibility

Considering the age group of the personas, ensure that the screens are accessible to all age groups by considering colors and ease of access.

6. UI consistency

In the initial days, there were multiple designers who handled the designs of the screen. There was a lot of UI inconsistency in terms of padding, component usage, etc… This was mainly due to there were no proper guidelines and a design system present at that time.

My Role

I led the revamp of the flow and screens to enhance the experience and visual appeal. I worked closely with a team of two interns who reported to me, guiding them through tasks such as Primary and secondary research. Together, we focused on applying design principles to intuitive screen layouts. My objective was to improve the overall user experience by ensuring attention to detail and a commitment to user-centric design.

Research

We started with the primary research even before when we got the buy in for the project from the major stakeholders. We kicked off the project with a competitive analysis exercise.

Competitive Analysis

In assessing the competitive landscape for the project, we examined 3 direct competitors and 1 indirect competitor. Each offers unique strengths and approaches to product experience, problem-solving, and visual representation. The key takeaway from the exercise is shown below.

Service Blueprint

Since most of the dealerships were located outside India, it was very difficult to understand their interactions and the components delivering that service. This led us to decide to create a service blueprint. Initially, we created the blueprint based on our understanding and then validated it with the product specialist. This was an iterative process, with many iterations done for different sub-modules within the purchase order.

One of the major wins from the service blueprint exercise was that the product team/design team started using this document as an onboarding document for new hires at Tekion, as one person mentioned:

This is 100% effective than the normal power point presentation that the team uses for every on boarding

The below service blueprint is just only for one type of order. There are a total of 8 different types of purchase orders that can be created through Tekion.

One of the platforms that I used to understand the user problem was through subreddits. We mostly went through the r/partscounter and r/serviceadvisors subreddit where users shared their frustration and feature requests. Through this, we identified the common issues and gathered real user feedback when we did the user interviews. This helped us to make design decisions based on actual user needs rather than assumptions.

User Interviews

Instead of conducting the usual user interviews, we approached it differently. We aimed to understand user problems through discussions about the product, workflow, etc., rather than using a traditional questionnaire format. Additionally, the team had the opportunity to conduct contextual inquiries by visiting several dealerships in the United States, Europe, and Canada as part of the product discovery process and observing workflows in their natural environments.

How we narrowed down the list of participants was based on the date of onboarding the dealership to our system. This means the dealerships that are newly onboarded to our system were chosen because they have a fresh perspective compared to those that have been using our platform for a longer time.

Roadblock — Re-evaluating the objective

After the user interviews, we hit our first roadblock. The objectives we assumed at the beginning of the project were just hypotheses. After the user interviews only we got to know the exact problem also a couple of additional ones got added to the list.

✅Added - Make the whole process keyboard-friendly

To create a purchase order in the system, the user needs to use a mouse or trackpad extensively. Because of this, users are complaining that it affects their efficiency. The main reason for this is that the previous tool that most dealerships used had keyboard shortcuts. This was a challenging one because all the other DMS is a native desktop app. So that the keyboard shortcuts were smooth. On the other side, Tekion is a cloud-based app. So the speed and everything totally depends on the internet connection

✅Added - More data visibility on the table data

One of the major problem that the user faced was data visibility on the screen. The user had to do a lot of horizontal and vertical scroll. This was mainly due to how the data was presented on the screen.

❌Removed - Unify the 2 sub modules together

Support tickets/Feature tracker

With the help of the customer support team, we gathered a list of support tickets for a specific time period. This helped us identify common issues and, to some extent, understand user needs, allowing us to address the most critical problems in the tool. This process also helps us future-proof the tool by aligning new features with user expectations

After bucketing the issues we connected with the product specialists to understand why the users are facing this problem in terms of support tickets and got some more deep insights on the new features that the dealership was requesting to add to the system.

Designs

After the research phase then we started with the UI explorations for the project. This was an iterative process. At every design phase, we continuously connected with the other team members from the product and dev team and gathered their feedback to avoid late conflicts.

The major redesigns were done to the following things:

1. Progressive disclosure

Reduced a couple of additional screens by using progressive disclosure. One of the main problems that users complained about was the number of clicks and redirections. To address this, we implemented the progressive disclosure technique. The solution involved identifying the key data capture points for the user and revealing the remaining data based on their selections.

2. Reworked table component

Another significant change was made to the table structure. In the old design, each table row occupied up to 40px of the screen, requiring users to scroll extensively to view the entire table. By reducing the row height to 24px, we were able to accommodate more data on the screen without creating a cluttered appearance.

3. More screen real estate

Another significant change was utilizing the white space on the screens. The older versions had a lot of wasted white space. In the revamp, we made sure to use this space to accommodate useful data rather than adding random elements to the screen.

4. Ability to receive the parts from the order screen itself

Instead of consolidating the orders and receiving screens, we introduced the ability to receive parts directly from the orders screen itself. This avoids unnecessary redirection, which is beneficial for small dealerships with fewer employees and limited access to modules.

5. Keyboard shortcuts to make the workflow easier

Introduced keyboard shortcuts to make the employees’ workflow easier. Instead of adding shortcuts to the entire flow, we focused on adding them to main actions such as add, delete, submit etc…

6. Table configurator

Added an option on the table to configure the list of visible columns. This will be a user-level configuration where the user can decide which all columns they need to see in the table. Apart from the visibility user can rearrange and lock the table if necessary. This helped us to tackle the problem of hidden data inside the scroll.

7. Added trackable metrics for better design decisions

To track the overall speed and performance of the flow asked the dev team to track few metrics actively in the analytics tool. These metrics were:

Document creation speed
Usage of input type (Mouse/Keyboard)

Beta testing later final rollout

Once the development for the screen was completed, we planned to roll out the new screen batch by batch to dealerships. We selected dealerships based on the number of support tickets raised for the purchase order module. One thing we did not do was completely remove the old version from the system. Instead, we provided users with the option to revert to the old version, along with requesting feedback on the new one. Later we rolled out the newly revamped screens to more and more dealerships on later days and closely observed the support tickets.