Role — Design Lead, Lloyds Banking Group
Date — November 2018 to Summer 2019
Brief — Create an in-house service for dealers and customers to sell and purchase cars
Outcome — Ongoing delivery
Car finances represents 20% of Lloyds Banking Groups' profits, but is at increasing risk from a fast moving regulatory changes, consumer attitudes and expectations and manufacturer strategies.
52% of people are confused by the process of buying a car - a percentage that is significantly higher for women, minorities and younger people. This was a systemic issue - from sales practices and techniques, to the products offered by banks and even the regulatory input.
I was brought in to bring together two streams of work; strategy and delivery, across two teams; rental and purchase and design a new in-house option for help dealers sell cars, and customers manage their car finances.
Car financing is one of the most convoluted and complex service journeys. Users are informed by gut feeling and hear'say, and often have to deal with multiple parties offering conflicting information - many of which are often fuelled by commission.
Lloyds did not have a clear view of the entire car buying service that was agnostic of internal team divisions or product choices. So this was a clear place to start.
After running several months of research that involved shadowing dealers work, following customers through their purchasing experience and even secret shopping, I was able to compile a full map of the service.
The Service Map shows the end to end experience of getting, managing and changing a car. It shows both the complexity of the system - and the fact that no one journey is the same. Whilst user must pass through each major step - the way they complete each step can change based on previous experience, age, demographic, product or even dealership style.
Service map - November 2018
I also mapped the broad user insights from user research underneath the journey - (these looked great printed up about 10 feet wide on the walls of the office).
Research insights - November 2018
It was clear there were some serious problem areas for the journey - finding a few key areas to focus limited resource on became key.
I designed a three day co-design session to find three ideas we could experiment with. To help the large group of people who hadn't been directly involved in research, I created an 'evidence safari that put insights on the walls like an exhibition.