Reimagining Carcraft with Carfinance247 and accelerating digital transformation

Carcraft was a brand with a tarnished reputation, infamously known as ‘Carshaft’. Their previous platform was built on outdated technology with a poor user experience and unclear proposition.

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After liquidating in 2015, CarFinance 247 bought the rights to the brand for its great SEO value. They had a vision to resurrect Carcraft with a digital-first mindset, and we helped to make that vision a reality.

We began with a research phase to gain an understanding of the user needs, business requirements and competitors in the market. Using the hierarchy of persuasion model, we evaluated the Carcraft and competitor websites with a UX and content expert review.

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Stakeholder interviews helped define key business objectives, the vision and strategy for the new product, as well as current data and insights. All of this research informed the design of a product canvas, proto-personas and experience map.

Through a series of brand-focused workshops and quick iterations, we created a new identity, logo, and visual language that aimed to modernise the brand, bringing it into the digital age.

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The new logo was based on momentum and energy. The arrow mark nods towards their design vision of assembling energy, breaking the process down into small steps that help to build momentum.

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It also nods towards our relationship with CarFinance 247. Customers start their journey at Carcraft, and move on to complete their journey at CarFinance 247.

After gathering initial research and defining a strategy with the key stakeholders, we used our design sprint process to go from a challenge to a solution which we could test and learn from.

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1. Day one – we defined the challenges to explore, informed by research and a series of lightning talks.
2. Next, we imagined a new experience focused on our top themes, using ideation methods to rapidly sketch solutions.
3. We decided which solution to focus on, then defined the core experience and prototype flow and took forward two ideas to test.
4. We took the two winning ideas and created low-fidelity prototypes ready for testing.
5. We tested these prototypes with five users in our usability lab to get feedback and insight.

The journey was made up of three key pages; homepage, search results and vehicle details page. We worked closely with the frontend team to create a styleguide and component library which became an atomic design system called ‘Luna’.

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Luna became a product outside of Carcraft which we developed as an internal styleguide and component library to use across many future Code projects.

After launching the MVP as an A/B test against the old site, conversions increased by 140% within one month, resulting in a projected extra £7m+ revenue a year. We used the AARRR model (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) to create a measurement framework and monitor conversions.

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After the successful launch, we collaborated with CarFinance 247 to help onboard a new internal team, which were hired to continue the development in-house.