As I joined Cazoo in January 2021, the company had recently set the wheels in motion to begin expanding its offering to include a new form of car ownership. The Cazoo Subscription Service aimed to bring the experience of driving and running a car (and all its rigours) into an easy, hands-free low maintenance package. The primary goal was to allow customers to experience the joys of driving with none of the hassles of car maintenance or management. All you need to do is add fuel.
I was part of this ambitious project to bring the subscriptions proposition into the existing Cazoo eCommerce experience, and present this new and exciting car access opportunity to a new customer demographic.
Cazoo was already a household name at this point for purchasing a used car. The team and I were tasked to deep dive into the needs of a brand new customer base and build the subscription proposition and experience around their needs. Naturally, this created the challenge of appealing to the new demographic with an existing brand name. Bringing the relevant information and tools to the forefront of this new experience would be paramount. Additionally, we were aware of the risks this introduced to the existing proposition. The team had to avoid diluting information for the existing customer base, and, in a worst-case scenario, creating a confusing and convoluted journey for both new and current shoppers.
The team and I needed to build the new proposition from the ground up. We aimed to identify the needs, habits, and desires of the new demographic through rapid prototyping and testing cycles. We aimed to successfully launch the subscription proposition to customers at the same level already attained by the businesses existing retail model.
Strategy and Kick off
After joining the company, I was briefed on the new products core offering. The broader strokes of what the business was able to offer in the way of a physical product were largely defined, however, the user base that this would appeal too, and what they wanted were largely unknown. I teamed up with a user researcher, one other product designer and two product managers to answer these questions.
We started with a focus group of potential customers and target users. After a series of interviews, we sifted through their wants, current driving habits and feature requests and were able to identify their key pain points; they wanted simple car ownership, with flexibility, on their terms. Although we knew that the total offering could grow to be something much more robust, we focused on creating an MVP that focused on these needs.
User & System flows
In tandem with these initial interviews, we also analysed competitor products and businesses that were also venturing into this space. We compiled an analysis of 8 competitors products (including Ford and Sixt) to help inform our view of user expectations.
As part of a cross-disciplinary team, we used this initial synthesis and analysis to begin mapping out both the user flows and the systems architecture that would be needed to deliver an MVP. This was achieved through a series of design spikes, technical spikes, and Event storming workshops which I ran and facilitated.
Rapid iteration and testing
As we developed these maps around the identified customer pain points and goals, we recorded the risks and assumptions that were uncovered. We sorted these by risk level with our stakeholder groups and planned to validate and de-risk through a process of rapid prototyping and testing.
The process we launched lasted six weeks, in which we tested a variety of layouts and content hierarchies over four iterations. We tested each iteration with six users from our target demographic for a day. The team and I generated prototypes, interview scripts, assumption matrices and working high fidelity prototypes.
Synthesis and outcome
After each round of testing, we synthesised the outcomes using our assumption matrices and a group of engineers, stakeholders and product managers. From these, we refined the user flows, interactions, content hierarchy to the point we were confident in the process we would be releasing.
The final area of the flow I lead the design of related to the ‘Search & Browse’ experience that users would be undertaking.
Cazoo Flex
We found most customers, whether familiar with car subscriptions or not, are not prepared to choose an ownership model immediately after entering their flow. We opted not to force the user's hand at this point in their search and instead allowed for a looser general filtering system.
Following our competitor analysis, we suggested that a new proposition be encompassed under a sub-brand of Cazoo (with the placeholder name ‘Cazoo Flex’. This is instead placed just below a primary filter module and in the content of the page. A link in the top-level navigation was also added allowing curios users, or users returning to the site to gain access to the proposition easily.
Content Architecture
As the proposition is new to Cazoo and the mainstream industry, we were aware that a fair amount of education was required into the finer print of what Cazoo Flex included. We observed over the various rounds of testing which parts of the proposition served as motivators to users, and which parts were most confusing.
From this analysis, we built the content architecture in three phases:
- An introduction, or ‘sales’ phase which outlined the breadth of the proposition and essential information such as cost. This phase also served to ground users understanding of the model by comparing it to more common ownership models (such as PCP and leasing).
- A step-by-step phase, used for setting expectations and outlining the ins and outs of the subscription lifecycle.
- A fine-print phase, reassuring the customer and giving them transparency on how to use a subscription should something go wrong.
This content strategy is baked into the proposition, with multiple entry points and journeys accommodated. As users browse they are invited along paths that give this information in bite-size chunks. Below is the most distilled version of this journey contained within the Cazoo Flex hub.
Filtering
An overhaul to the filtering system was required to enable customers to interact with the new proposition without completely divorcing it from Cazoo’s existing systems.
Cazoo Flex was added into the payment filters, with customers first being presented with an ‘All; bucket. This allowed us to surface both New (Cazoo Flex) cars alongside second hand ‘traditional ownership’ cars. The hierarchy of all product cards we revised to accommodate the new variation in data points. We also introduced ‘education cards’ into the grid used to give more exposure to the education journey for the proposition. We hypothesised that the new product card layout and education card system could be leveraged for future initiatives, creating an in-shop CMS usable by both marketing, and content teams.
Product
The funnel of the search & browse journey leads users to the product page. These new product pages also surfaced well due to SEO, and aggregate sites taking on Cazoo’s stock. Because of this, we had to be sure that customers entering the journey at this point still had all the opportunities to explore and rationalise the proposition as users entering further up the funnel.
The new Cazoo Flex product pages are unique in the way they combine the classic stats of the car with the ownership model highlights. We learnt early on in our discovery cycle that customers viewed the included insurance as much as part of the product as the number of doors. This led us to a content system that allowed users to rationalise this information in this format.
These pages also give users the ability to refine a subscription-based on their terms, cementing the customisation of the offering. This is an opportunity to validate Cazoo Flex's pricing system, as well as give users concrete numbers to compare and contrast against traditional models.
The subscription proposition MVP was launched with moderate success, meeting both the first and second quarter OKR’s with almost no iteration at this time. The work put into this launch by such a small team has been so substantial, a much larger series of teams are currently being created to take on the challenges that myself and the team discovered and set about tackling over following quarters.
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