Overview

mobile.de is Germany's largest online vehicle marketplace. Users can save vehicles to the Car Park (favorites), where comparison is a core job-to-be-done. We wanted to understand how users compare cars across the search journey, with a focus on the Car Park, and identify opportunities to improve the experience across desktop and mobile.

I led the end-to-end study, translating research findings into product opportunities and experiments that improved contact rates.

Role & team

Product Designer & Research Lead, collaborating with Product, Engineering, and UX Research.

Timeline

Jan 2024 - Mar 2024

Research approach

I conducted 10 moderated sessions, 5 desktop and 5 Android users who had recently searched for or purchased a car online. Each session combined an interview with usability testing.

1. User Interviews
Why?
To understand which criteria (like vehicle details, dealer info, payment options like leasing or online buying etc) are most relevant while searching for a vehicle and why.

How?
By asking users how they usually find a vehicle they like and contact the seller.

2. Usability Test
Why?
To understand how users compare: what is helping them and what makes it hard for them to compare while searching on mobile.de and specifically on the Car Park.

How?
By setting a scenario and observing users to carry out specific tasks while talking out loud.

Analysis process

1. Note taking

I created a shared note-taking framework and invited Product and Engineering to join the sessions, giving the team direct exposure to user problems.

2. Mapping the pain points across the journey

I mapped the pain points, user drivers, neutral observations and ideas per participant, per each step of the search journey, like the vehicle info and the Car Park (“Parkplatz” in German, favorites) step.

We now had pain points and drivers mapped per each step per participant, across the whole search journey: from the Homepage to detailed search, search results page, vehicle info page, Car Park, and finally, the comparison page.

I conducted this mapping exercise for each participant on both desktop and Android. This helped reveal how comparison behaviors differed between desktop and Android across the journey.

3. Clustering insights

I clustered all pain points and drivers of all the 5 participants, per each step of the search journey, like the vehicle info step and the Car Park step, per platform.

With all the pain points and user drivers clustered from all participants per each step, I proceeded to map them to a 4 quadrant matrix, where we can visually clearly see the "User pains” (red), “User drivers” (green),” Ideas & suggestions by users” (blue) and “Neutral observation / feedback” (yellow).

With all the insights clustered together, we now had a matrix of main user pain points and drivers at each step of the search journey: Homepage, detailed search, search results page, vehicle info page, Car Park and comparison feature page, for both desktop and Android.

Key insights

• Users lacked key information to compare confidently
  Important specs and equipment weren’t consistently visible across the journey.

• Differences between vehicles were difficult to spot
  Users wanted clearer visual cues to compare at a glance.

• Existing comparison tools lacked discoverability and clarity
  Compare functionality was often missed, while price ratings and sorting weren’t always understood.

• Comparison happened throughout the journey
  Users compared while browsing, viewing individual cars, and revisiting saved vehicles.
  

Ideation

After sharing the insights, I facilitated ideation sessions with my team and cross-functional stakeholders to translate the research insights into product opportunities across the search journey.

From research to impact

The research and ideation created a prioritized backlog of comparison opportunities across the journey. The first two ideas we tested increased Car Park contact rates by 10% and overall contact rates by 5%.