Farie

At Farie, I led the creation of a reusable design system, the redesign of the homepage, and the development of a customer portal. The goal was to ensure a consistent and high-quality user experience across all digital touchpoints. The design system was built to standardize UI components across different tech environments (code & no-code), ensuring that developers could reuse elements efficiently while maintaining a cohesive look and feel.

As part of this initiative, I also led the redesign of the homepage, focusing on optimizing communication with customers and improving the user journey. By conducting competitor analysis and extensive A/B testing of various UI and UX elements, we identified the best ways to engage users and guide them through the car-buying process.

To further enhance the customer experience, I developed a customer portal that allowed users to manage their reservations, track the status of cars, and easily access essential information about their purchases. The combination of these efforts resulted in a more streamlined, engaging, and trustworthy platform for users.

The key challenge was maintaining consistency across a growing platform that served a variety of tech environments. The solution was to build a modular, reusable design system that allowed developers to implement standardized components quickly and with minimal customization. This system ensured that the brand’s visual and interaction consistency was maintained, regardless of the device or platform being used.

For the homepage redesign, the problem was that users struggled to find relevant information, leading to frustration and higher bounce rates. By conducting in-depth competitor analysis and A/B testing, we tested different layouts and communication strategies to find the most effective approach. The redesigned homepage made it easier for users to navigate, find information about cars, and engage with the platform, leading to improved conversion rates.

Challenges

However, during testing, we faced the challenge of low user sessions, which limited the reliability of our results. To address this, we analyzed trends and refined our testing approach iteratively, setting up tests with fewer variants as soon as a trend was detected.

Once we were left with the final version, which showed positive performance compared to the control, we gradually increased traffic to it. This approach allowed us to ensure consistent performance as more users interacted with the updated design, eventually leading to a full traffic rollout. By incrementally scaling up, we reduced risks and ensured the new version was thoroughly validated before full implementation, even with low traffic.

The creation of the customer portal addressed another key pain point: users needed a centralized place to manage their reservations and access information about their purchases. However, since the customer portal was completely new, we faced the challenge of having little to no customer data, as users were unfamiliar with what a portal for our product could offer. We realized that while our customers didn’t yet understand its potential value, we still needed to build something that addressed their future needs.

To tackle this, I conducted a KJ method workshop involving several stakeholders, experts, and customer success teams to identify what essential needs the customer portal should cover. Through this collaborative process, we gathered insights from different perspectives and ensured that the portal would address both immediate and evolving customer expectations.

Once the core needs were identified, I created the information architecture and conducted card sorting exercises with different stakeholders to align the structure and check understanding of the information.

The portal simplified the user experience by providing seamless access to the information users cared about most – such as their reservations, transaction history, and important notifications – resulting in improved user satisfaction and a reduction in customer service inquiries.

Success was monitored through digital user session recordings and customer interviews, which contributed to continuous improvements in both the portal and the reservation process. By iterating based on real user behavior and feedback, we were able to refine the experience over time.

Key takeaway

A key takeaway from this process was the realization that we had to trust our expertise and instincts rather than relying solely on data, as we were unable to gather enough statistically relevant insights.

It also became clear that simply asking customers what they want isn’t always effective, especially when they can’t fully envision a new product. Instead, we focused on the challenges faced by customers as highlighted by multiple stakeholders, using this input to design a solution that addressed the customers current pain points, even if it wasn’t something they had explicitly asked for.

This approach allowed us to create a product that genuinely helped customers while relying on a mix of intuition and expert knowledge.