myKaarma

A software management tool for auto dealerships that makes customer interactions easy for everything from payments to communications to inspections

My Role

I interned with myKaarma for over a year where I had great deal of ownership over my work. The first 6 months was a product management internship working directly with the ServiceCart Product Manager. In the latter 6+ months, I was a product design intern on the same team and completed designs for the features I owned.

Project Overview

A demand from numerous dealerships for building out a tool to see what was previously declined and re-add to a repair order on ServiceCart mobile and desktop. I led the end-to-end design of this feature. Project goals included:

Exploration + Validation Research: Better understand the habits, desires, painpoints of various stakeholders (Technicians + Service Advisors). Validate the need for specific features for this tool.

Build: Write requirements and coordinate with various internal stakeholders (Product Managers, dev teams, UX designers), create UX mockups

Training: Train internal teams (sales, training) and users (technicians) on the new tools

User Research

I conducted initial interviews with internal company members and a dozen dealership personnel of various roles to understand the applications and desired functionalities. Continued to gather feedback once prototypes were built out.

Overarching Insights:

  • Because each dealership has their own workflow and method for dealing with declines, must make the tool accessible to various roles

  • Process of viewing and adding declines should seamlessly be implemented into dealership workflows

  • Capture specific information to be preserved when declines are re-recommended

Product Requirements

Ultimately this project ended up crossing three products in the company and so I facilitated continuous negotiation about the product features and details. The tool was rolled out to alpha dealers for initial feedback. I used Jira to manage the feature and coordinate with engineers and designers.

UX/UI Design

I designed the user experience of this new feature for both desktop and mobile using company style guides. I also contributed to the style guides with new usability items.

Training

I prepared demo materials and conducted training sessions with various teams (i.e. sales, deployment) on how to use the tool and key functionalities. I received positive feedback from many internal company members as seen below.

“Leilani, This is fantastic news, this has long been awaited. We were just talking about this on a demo this week! Thank you and the team!” - Company CEO

Takeaways

Because I led this design of this feature from end-to-end, serving as user researcher, product designer, and product manager in this project, I learned a great deal about how to balance various stakeholder needs when creating any product, heeding the frustrations and suggestions of users while keeping in mind what is feasible and necessary to create.