<aside> 💡 Role: Senior Product Designer, Lead Product Designer Focus: UX Strategy, Delivery Strategy, UI Design, Design Implementation Company: Driveway

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Background

Driveway, a digital platform for buying, selling, and servicing cars, initially focused on feature parity with competitors and the shopping experience. The My Driveway account center—where users could favorite cars, add trade-in vehicles, and get pre-qualified for financing—remained outdated despite being crucial to the customer journey. As the company matured, the account center needed updating to connect different revenue-driving funnels.

As the primary designer, I led the design strategy from discovery to implementation for several features enhancing the account experience. I collaborated with the product team to advocate for updates and gain stakeholder support, as these changes unblocked future roadmap items.

Phased Approach

The My Driveway account included a Dashboard offering a dynamic overview of account to-dos based on customer actions, along with seven detail pages for specific tasks. Due to the number of pages and their complexity, a phased approach was necessary:

1. Layout and Grid Alignment: Updated detail pages to brand standards and design system grid, laying the foundation for future enhancements.
2. Improved Navigation: Introduced consistent navigation across all account pages and the dropdown menu.
3. Future-Proofed UI: Updated the My Vehicles and Favorites pages for flexibility and adaptability, anticipating future roadmap priorities.
4. Shop and Sell Funnels: Developed new features and enhancements to connect to revenue-driving funnels after establishing the foundational pages.

Breaking Down My Approach

Layout and Grid Alignment

The foundation of the updates to the My Driveway account was the layout of the detail pages. To set the team up for future enhancements, this area needed to be addressed first.

The My Driveway Dashboard adhered to new brand standards, but the detail pages had drastically different styling and didn't follow the design system grid. The existing 2-column layout was inflexible, stretching content too wide on extra-large breakpoints and condensing it too narrow on smaller tablet breakpoints.

Creating a flexible UI that accommodated these extremes while optimizing for the most popular breakpoints. To achieve this, I worked closely with front-end engineers and the design system team to develop a flex-grid system aligned with our site grid.

Improved Navigation

With the layout addressed, our next objective was to encourage customers to navigate between the various detail pages in the My Driveway account.

The problem: The navigation on the Dashboard was inconsistent with the account dropdown and the detail pages.