Industry: Automotive
Featured Methods: 1-on-1 Usability Testing

One of the world’s leading auto manufacturers and their media agency wanted to learn more about how they could improve the experience for consumers in the market for a used vehicle. The agency had developed innovative co-branded promotional pages with two major search engines and wanted to optimize the pages to better meet consumers’ needs and to drive more leads to dealers. We were asked to perform a usability assessment of these promotional pages, to see if they were achieving these key objectives.

In order to see first-hand if the consumer was responding well to our client’s promotional pages, we conducted one day of usability testing, interviewing 8 target consumers and watching them interact with the pages in question. Our researchers were especially interested in understanding the searching behaviors of certified used vehicle shoppers, and if they fully grasped the value proposition of the auto manufacturer’s certified used car program. We tracked impressions, emotions, and behavior of each interviewee as they interacted with the promotional pages.

We learned that users found a great deal of value in the promotional pages served by the auto manufacturer’s search engine partners, but many did not learn the key benefits of the certified used vehicle program when using the search pages. Users were also wary of submitting a lead to a dealer, a critical call to action. We recommended solutions to these issues by focusing on positioning, messaging, clearer benefit statements and better organization of information on the page to better map to user expectations and their own mental model of the services being offered. The client was able to move forward with prioritized recommendations to make their service even more relevant and appealing to buyers of used vehicles.

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