Bumper Marketplace Product Launch
As the lead product designer, I guided the end-to-end design and launch of Bumper’s vehicle marketplace platform. This initiative aimed to expand Bumper’s business model into the vehicle sales space, addressing user frustrations with existing car search experiences while positioning the company for future revenue growth.
Through user research, iterative design, and close cross-functional collaboration, we delivered a platform that increased lead generation by 30%, drove a 26% uptick in feature adoption, and boosted overall user interactions by 27%—validating the platform’s value to both users and the business.
At its inception, Bumper grappled with fundamental questions: Who are our users? What are they seeking, and what hurdles do they face in our platform? The answers lay in a methodical approach to usability testing, which promised insights into user behavior and preferences, guiding the evolution of Bumper's user experience.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis was clear-cut — the platform's basic functionality was a source of user friction and confusion. The mission was to uncover these friction points and transform them into opportunities for enhancement, aiming to elevate overall user satisfaction and engagement metrics.
By understanding user needs, motivations and expectations as well as points of friction we will be able to turn them into to optimizations that will increase lead rate and time on page
Through user interviews and journey mapping, I uncovered friction points in vehicle search experiences, including information overload, poor filtering, and low trust in listings.These insights directly informed our MVP feature set, prioritizing clear filtering, verified seller details, and trust-building elements—ensuring the platform differentiated itself in a crowded market.
Interviewing users to learn more
Themes
- Price was one of the most important determining factors
- Users compare vehicles to find the best option for them to purchase
- Email and calling are of equal importance for contacting sellers
- Saving potential vehicles for later is important to decision making
- A dynamic filter that updates every time as it is being used is essential
- Searching caused users friction
- Users were confused by language inconsistencies
- Users share results to get second options from others on a car they were considering purchasing
The filter interface was modified to allow multiple selections and standardized terminology, ensuring that different shades of blue, like "Glacier Blue" from Chevy and "Aegean Blue" from Honda, are now categorized under a single "blue" option. The hierarchy of filter options was also reorganized to be more inline with user expectations
A feature was designed and introduced that allows users to compare up to three vehicles side-by-side, facilitating informed purchasing decisions. This comparison tool covers details from price to performance, with the option to add or remove vehicles easily, ensuring users have all the information they need at their fingertips.
We introduced a vehicle details page to streamline the user journey, improve lead tracking, addressing the issue where users were previously sent directly to sellers' websites, which disrupted their browsing experience and made tracking leads challenging.
Our research indicated a split preference among users for contacting sales: half favored phone calls while the other half preferred email. In response, we designed a contact form offering balanced options for both, including a prewritten message to simplify communication with sellers.
We discovered users prefer to ponder their options before contacting sellers, leading us to develop a one-click saving feature. This allows users to compile a list of vehicles and access it on a dedicated page for future consideration.
Leads genrated
Feature usage
Overall interactions
Enhancing an Bumper Marketplace with design optimizations informed by usability testing resulted in significant improvements to the main KPIs of lead generation, time on page, and i affiliate link visits.
