Automotive Industry
UX OPERATIONS AT SCALE
Driving Innovation in the Automotive Industry Through Human-Centered Design and Lean Research Practices
Over four years, I worked as a Lead Experience Design Consultant for two key clients in the automotive industry, focusing on creating cohesive user experiences and establishing sustainable research and design practices. A key initiative involved addressing the challenges of aligning corporate digital business teams with the needs of a large, diverse, dealer network. Through lean research, collaborative workshops, and human-centered design principles, I helped deliver innovative solutions that balanced user needs with business goals while driving organizational change.
Note:
For confidentiality purposes, all commercial details and proprietary information have been redacted. If you'd like to learn more or see additional work samples, please reach out via email.
The Challenge
Rapid shifts in the automotive industry, accelerated by economic and global market pressures, required organizations to rethink their digital strategies. One critical challenge was ensuring alignment between corporate teams and dealer networks to build a platform that catered to both dealer and customer needs. Within tight deadlines, our team was tasked with gathering actionable insights in a lean and efficient manner.
A dealer representative voices key pain points in the service cycle at their dealership.
The Approach
Lean Research & Co-Design Practices
Designed and facilitated workshops to align cross-functional teams on key priorities.
Conducted on-site and remote interviews with dealers and customers, using techniques like contextual inquiry, focus groups, and 1-1 interviews to gather insights on workflows, pain points, and opportunities.
Developed a hypothesis-driven approach to research rounds, collaborating with stakeholders to define goals, outcomes, and methods for each iteration.
Information Architecture & Journey Mapping
Designed empathy maps, proto personas, and journey blueprints to align corporate and dealer perspectives, identifying key moments of friction and potential enhancements.
Developed comprehensive and targeted user journey maps through collaborative workshops, leveraging them as validation tools to identify and highlight key opportunities within the customer and dealer experience.
A targeted journey map of the financial services drafted following user interviews, used as a validation artifact in subsequent interviews.
Prototyping & Iterative Feedback Loops
Developed prototypes at various fidelities to test and validate ideas with dealers and end-users.
Established a feedback loop, showcasing post-launch dealer insights to executives to illustrate the value of continuous feedback.
UX Coaching & Research Repository Development
Partnered with a growing UX team to scale design operations, emphasizing cross-market collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Migrated and structured a UX research repository for U.S. and Canadian markets to support global product teams with actionable insights.
Informal gorilla-style interviews during expositions enabled input gathering from a variety of dealer roles, such as service and sales representatives.
The Impact
Dealer-Centric Solutions
Delivered a dealer-informed digitized journey blueprint outlining pain points, questions, and opportunities.
Created ongoing design artifacts and research insights recommendations that enabled product teams to make value-driven decisions that balanced dealer needs with broader business objectives.
Collaborative journey, empathy mapping, and HMW exercises helped to better understand the landscape from the client perspective, as well as dealer representative perspective. We organized attendees into small multi-disciplinary groups to foster 20-min discussions, then rotated to different “stations” to gather perspectives from all key stakeholders:
Streamlined Research Practices
Established lean research frameworks, enabling faster insight generation and alignment across cross-functional product and business teams.
Built a sustainable roadmap for ongoing research, ensuring user needs informed future initiatives.
Organizational Growth
Supported the expansion of UX capabilities - coaching and mentoring a dedicated UX team. Secured necessary funding and approvals for expansion of ongoing UX research.
Facilitated the adoption of human-centered design principles across teams, fostering a culture of user-driven innovation.
Organizing opportunity workshops with the wider product team helped to survey and brainstorm ideas related to quarterly goals. Organizing breakout sessions focused on HMW’s based on business use cases can help to to foster creative thinking with a cross-functional team.
Key Takeaways
Over four years of working with key clients in the automotive industry, I gained deep expertise and firsthand insight into the critical role of design to drive meaningful impact across complex digital systems. These systems form the backbone of a global supply chain, continually adapting to market demands and pressures. This experience has equipped me with strategies and lessons that transcend the automotive sector, enabling me to apply impactful design principles across diverse industries. Here are the key tactics and takeaways I’ve integrated into my design practice beyond the automotive industry:
Collaborative Workshops: Bringing together diverse stakeholders fosters shared understanding and alignment on priorities.
Lean Research: Quick, iterative feedback loops ensure solutions are grounded in real user needs while meeting tight deadlines.
Omni channel Vision: Mapping the end-to-end journey for both dealers and customers enables organizations to identify and address gaps in experience delivery.
Sustainable Design Practices: Building UX infrastructure, such as research repositories, design frameworks, and ongoing funding, supports long-term organizational change.
Design Visioning: Visualizations and prototypes of a user-driven design vision generates excitement, inspires actionable pathways, and fosters alignment among design and non-design stakeholders.