After decades of individual acquisitions, Cox Automotive sought to unified its B2B products by introducing its first enterprise design system. I was selected by product and UX directors to lead the initiative. My responsibilities included:

• Forming and gelling a team of designers and engineers from different departments.
• Coordinating the migration and creation of 30+ components and patterns for use by 10 product-lines.
• Authoring a token-based theming solution for white-labeling.
• Establishing a multi-disciplinary governance model for decision making.
• Communicating the change to product, engineering, and UX team members.
• Creating a documentation site for all team members.

The team’s success helped secure investment in dedicated resources to accelerate growth. Today, the Interstate Design System is being integrated in Cox’s most trafficked products, as well as all new B2B products.

Dealer.com provides a platform for hosting and managing 10,000+ automotive dealership websites. It requires look-and-feel compliance for 25+ manufacturers (OEMs), as well as independent dealerships and groups. As the company grew, its original theming solution became outdated. Creating OEM themes took 3 months to complete, and introducing new features often led to color clashes and accessibility issues.

To address these challenges, I proposed the development of a standard library and theming solution that could scale to our customer’s needs. This involved:

• Securing leadership buy-in and investment.
• Collaborating with product and engineering teams to develop a roadmap.
• Designing a token-based theming solution to support 25+ manufacturers.
• Authoring documentation for designers and engineers.

The resulting system, Kinetic, reduced theme creation time by 40% and decreased theme-related defects by 90%. Today it is used in all Dealer.com products.

View the Kinetic website for more details.

Given the unique needs of each auto dealership, Dealer.com’s website management platform offers extensive configurability. However, this abundance of options often leaves customers unsure about the best configuration for their site.

To address this challenge and others, I created a collection of data-backed recommendations to help customers configure their website for optimal visitor experience and conversion. The collection, known as the Dealer.com UX Playbook, has been used by product, UX, and client-facing teams. It has been presented to auto manufacturers including Audi, Ford, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo, as well as individual dealerships and dealer groups.

View the UX Playbooks for guidance on Homepage, SRP, VDP, Site-wide, or Mobile optimization.

Dealer.com’s search results page (SRP) helps dealership customers browse and compare inventory. It is the most visited page on the platform with 60+ million visits a month. However, after a decade, its original design showed signs of aging: it lacked mobile optimization, had slow filtering and sorting, disorganized vehicle information, and lacked cohesion due to incremental feature additions.

As UX Manager for our website platform, my team conducted design, research, and analysis efforts for the redesign of SRP. Responsibilities included:

• Leading a team of two designers and one analyst.
• Conducting research such as competitive analysis, user interviews, and usability tests.
• Facilitating cross-discipline human-centered design activities.
• Partnering with product and engineering peers to establish goals, a roadmap, and success metrics.

The redesigned page, featuring faster and more intuitive vehicle filtering and comparison, particularly on mobile, resulted in improved consumer satisfaction. Customers now regard the SRP as best-in-class among website providers.

Dealer.com’s vehicle details page (VDP) helps dealership customers explore vehicle features, estimate payment and financing, and contact the dealership. However, after 8 years, it showed signs of aging: lacking mobile optimization, disorganized vehicle information, and a lack of cohesion due to incremental feature additions.

As UX Architect for our website platform, I managed our team’s the VDP redesign efforts. My responsibilities included:

• Leading a team of two designers and one analyst.
• Conducting research such as competitive analysis, user interviews, and usability tests.
• Facilitating cross-discipline human-centered design activities.
• Partnering with product and engineering peers to establish goals, a roadmap, and success metrics.

The redesigned page resulted in 22% lift in conversion and improved customer satisfaction. It continues to be the industry benchmark for dealership vehicle pages.

Dealer.com hired its first UX researcher in 2011, establishing an attitudinal research program. However, the platform lacked event tracking, leaving a gap in behavioral research.

As a Technical Lead, I recognized the deficiency and developed a system to track user behavior across 10,000+ dealership websites. This included:

• Creating a schema for describing common interactions with buttons, form inputs, cards, etc.
• Developing a JavaScript API for ingestion, transformation, and storage in databases and analytics products including Google Analytics, BigQuery, Snowflake, Adobe Analytics, and proprietary data-stores.

Today, the system manages 70 million events a day and provides our product and UX teams with fast access to behavioral insights that continue to shape product and design decisions.