Dealertrack F&I Transactional App. Case Study
The industry’s standard for automotive financing.
Dealertrack is the industry’s largest Auto financing network, Dealertrack provides free, fast and easy connections to your financing sources, including captives, national banks, regional banks, subprime lenders, and credit unions. All types of dealers can access the credit application platform, including auto, RV, marine, powersport, and others.
From requesting credit reports, to building and submitting credit application data, to checking on the real-time status of contracts-in-transit, Dealertrack delivers all the functionality you need to drive more vehicle sales, expand your customer base, accelerate the speed of your financing process, and build stronger customer relationships
Business need
The business problem we were trying to solve is to increase usage, and reduce friction for submitting bureau requests, and credit application
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UX Goal
We needed to simplify and improve the efficiency of pulling credit bureau, completing and submitting credit applications and comparing the lenders responses.
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Challenge
At first glance it sounded pretty straight forward, but the more we spoke to the car dealers, salesmen and F&I managers, and learned about their methods, we realized it’s not that simple. In a very fast paced work environment where there is no set linear way to perform and complete a transaction at times over the phone. The user journeys are not sequential, and as a result, depending on the buyer and information available, they are opening many different pages out of sequence.
User Workflows Research & Analysis
At the start of the project I conducted research about the daily workflow for the dealer, and learned about Sales person and F&I manager’s role and strategy on of selling. With that, I created the user journey map to have a good work flow strategy. Along the way, I created a site map, more user flows, wireframes, prototyped functionality, and wrote specifications for design and behavior.
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Research & Goals
Coming out of research, we arrived at two core goals.
Speed: Busy dealers do not have the patience to wait on slow web pages to load. We streamlined the navigation to get the users where they want to go faster, and keeping content focused, timely and relevant.
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Consistent experience: Dealertrack already had a suite of supporting apps, Contract and Payment that the dealers use in order to complete the transaction, so we made sure that the experience was universal, and the user could access at any time and from any place. Finally, we had to be consistent. We set site-wide guidelines for things like buttons, forms, and how elements changed at different browser sizes.
Result
The results were definitive. Users liked the clean design and quick access to all the actionable tasks, and the ease with which they could find everything that they needed to finish the tasks and ultimately making them exponentially more efficient in their work. The enthusiasm and response was truly humbling.