Motorsport Showroom
Modernising motorsport trading
Challenge
To create a new product and modernise the existing buying and selling experience in the motorsport industry
Solutions
User research, Competitor audit, UX design, Prototyping, Digital branding, Front-end development, React, Ruby on Rails
Outcomes
The launch of a first release product with easy search, flexible filtering, seamless buyer-seller contact with simple and intuitive listing creation
Research & discovery
Gathering Insight
The initial product idea was full of potential features so we needed to get better acquainted with a couple of things:
- What propositions already exist in the market, and
- How do people in the industry use this platform and what are their primary pains and frustrations
What we found was that there was really only one main competitor that despite a large market share, motorsport people were frustrated by the lack of modern tools avaialble and an outdated online browsing experience.
Browsing
What we learnt was that most users we spoke to were using this main website on a daily basis like they would a social media feed. They were checking multiple times a day to see what was new and spot an opportunity. The persona we developed was one of a keen motorsport professional, entrepreneurial in nature, always on the hunt for spare parts for rare cars, or bargains to take advantage of.
So the expectation we needed to meet for this job story was to provide a browsing experience that was quick and easy to narrow down on certain, specific criteria.
Communication
The other significant frustration was how cumbersome the buyer → seller communication was. With an activity feed mentality, and short but frequent interactions, users wanted to be able to fire quick, instant messages to sellers to enquire. An increasingly digital audience with an expectation for instant messaging akin to the modern messaging tools used daily.
Prototyping user flows
Simple pricing
The main competitor was offering multiple levels of price points for different levels of service. Our research showed that the price point wasn't a huge decision making factor given the high value of the listings, what they cared about was selling the goods. As a point of differentiation we started with a simple and easy to understand pricing a initial category selection. You're either selling a racing car, parts, or transportation.
Listings
It became increasingly clear that to build a successful product and create traction, we needed to focus first on the listing creation process. Without listings, the proposition would fail, so our focus turned towards creating an easy and guided flow for creating a listing.
Tags
For users to be able to quickly find relevant listings, we needed to device a method for that which resulted in a pre-defined list of tags that could be added to a listing to give it meaning. This is where we leaned heavily on the clients inside knowledge to create the taxonomy of tags and categories.
Messaging
Modernising the messaging was a key part of the core proposition, but building a fully fledged bespoke messaging service was way too risky without any kind of validation. The first release leverages the WhatsApp messaging API as an option for sellers to display.
To remove friction and get conversations direct to inbox, we introduced a simple email form in the page. Buyers have to be registered to contact sellers and they can just fire a quick message that gets sent straight to email for the conversation to continue. No need for over engineered internal messaging systems, just email.
First release
Launch strategy
The project is still in a beta stage, with no active users. We are working with the client currently to devise a product strategy focused on refining the proposition and building a critical mass of core users and listings to compel a colder audience to adapt this as their go-to platform.
TBC…
