WTX Technologies
Vehicle invnetory management
Overview
WTX is a marketplace for used vehicles (mainly trucks), where the inventory was sourcing the vehicles from multiple vendors. With an increased volume of vehicles, inventory management became complex due to the extensive manual work needed to keep the content quality high.
After observation and research with our operations and business partners, I propose a strategy to implement a new
user experience and automated features. These would allow operations (ops) and business(sales) colleagues to prepare a go-to-market with the vehicles and spend less time on curating and managing their content.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Responsible for research, conceptualisation, design, user testing and delivery of key modules and feature areas.
Deliverables
Product Strategy
UX Research
High Fidelity Concepts
Prototyping
Design Handoff
Team
1 Product Designer
1 Product Manager
6 Software Engineers
Key Responsabilities
Collaborating closely with Product Manager and Engineers to execute the end-to-end design process;
Research and collaborate with Operations and Business Development colleagues to understand their modus operandi;
Creation of high-fidelity prototypes and design handover doc
Supporting engineering and QA through the build and testing process;
The dashboard allows users to have an overview of the inventory size and sales performance
View the vehicle inventory for a more detailed overview of the inventory status.
Vehicle content curation after an automated update from suppliers.
Explaining the Status Quo
As the vehicle sourcing was mainly automated, operations and business colleagues had to curate the pulled content. Both have their own task flows. The volume was achieving peaks of dozens of vehicles per day, and to keep track of the content curation or filtration of vehicles.
Dozens of vehicles were imported to the platform daily from different sources, which required manual workarounds and inefficient workflows to monitor the updates and content quality.
Vehicle inventory view, a status quo snapshot at the beginning of the project.
Vehicle inventory view, a status quo snapshot at the beginning of the project.
We were challenged to
Empower operations and businesses with efficient workflows to curate and manage vehicles efficiently.
Business goals
To scale the operations
effectively, we knew it was essential to build the inventory management workflow around four key goals:
Reduce time spent on tasks
Streamline high-level workflows for managing the vehicles on WTX Admin so operations and sales can work faster and save time.
Reduce ops touchpoints
Allow ops to work independently and in whatever way works for them, avoiding the need for engineering support.
Reduce setup handle times
Help the benefits ops and sales teams refocus their energy on more urgent matters and towards the goals defined.
Prioritize high-potential inventory:
Operations and Sales teams collaborate to identify and fast-track vehicles with strong sales potential, ensuring rapid visibility to customers.
Understanding the current snapshot
While working closely with operations and sales colleagues,
I saw their struggle and the numerous tasks they had to perform manually before publishing a vehicle in the marketplace. To understand the core and why of their tasks, I conducted 20+ interviews and observation sessions with operations and sales colleagues.
Remote meeting with vehicles suppliers
Introduction of the operations routines
Identified challenges
From the insights that I took from
those research sessions, I was capable to purpose to define four significant areas that required intervention and automation.
Vehicles were being imported in bulk
Operations were overwhelmed by the number of vehicles imported by automation, integrations, and third-party forms apps. After that, they had to manually verify each vehicle and perform a list of tasks for the content curation.
Fragmented and manual workflows
The large number of vehicles imported daily requires a significant amount of time to process due to the number of manual workflows with too many touchpoints, which creates friction in their work and slows them down.
Ops workflows can vary
Although operations have defined manual procedures and practices, each of them has a different way of approaching tasks and solving problems, leading to errors and misunderstandings. Standardization was required.
Lack of independence for each department
Sales rely on ops to process the organize the products (vehicles) and content. Ops relies on engineering and third-party tools to support and perform complex workflows.
Early usability testing with operations from initial iterations.
Observations
“
BizDev and Operations constantly need to understand the changes being made to trucks on a daily basis (e.g. a truck was being presented to a buyer, and the price changed or the vehicle is unavailable. They need to understand why these changes happened and by who. Normally done by the integration, which means that the truckstore has updated the information on their end.
This is currently being mitigated by providing them access to specific dashboards on Third-party where they are able to see all historical prices of a specific truck, as well as all change events from that vehicle.
“
In a meeting with Ops Team, was daily their priorities regarding the Vehicles, is to:
1. check the new added vehicles
2. check if exist vehicles with incomplete information
To achieve those task required that they have to create a X amount of filters, in order to achieve the table view they need to perform the task(s), every time they want to check, every day.
Problem Statement
WTX's operations team struggles to efficiently process high volumes of imported vehicles due to fragmented, manual workflows and inconsistent procedures, while dependencies create bottlenecks that slow down the go-to-market. All this complexity delayed vehicle listings, reduced sales opportunities, and inefficient use of operational resources.
How might we accelerate the vehicle-to-market process to improve both operational efficiency and sales team responsiveness.
Feature prioritization through user story mapping
Design decisions
The design process started with prioritizing fast deployment by leveraging existing patterns and new design iterations.
By working closely with engineering, we identified and adapted established patterns to the new context, resulting in an efficient feature implementation.
Inventory performance at a glance
The dashboard equips operations and sales teams with vital inventory performance metrics, focusing on business potential and sales velocity.
Teams can monitor vehicle counts, potential revenue, and time-to-sale data, enabling more informed decisions about inventory management and optimization strategies.
Segmentation with intention
Observing operations and sales made it possible to identify common filter patterns. Most of it was related to their curation and maintenance tasks, while others just positioned vehicles for sale. Using fixed-filtered views allows them to increase performance and act autonomously.
Shortcuts and visual indicators
Operations teams faced a challenge: each integration cycle brought new or updated vehicles, requiring a complete content review. This approach of checking every updated vehicle, regardless of change significance, was inefficient and time-consuming.
To solve this, we introduced a simple signaling system highlighting only meaningful changes, allowing operations to focus their review efforts where needed. The interface was enhanced with visual indicators and keyboard shortcuts, enabling faster and more efficient content curation.
Left-aligned action buttons
While placing action buttons on the left side of a table breaks common patterns, our research supported this unconventional choice for two key reasons:
First, user testing revealed a clear preference for immediate access to action buttons without horizontal scrolling. We prioritized the most critical information to remain visible, allowing less frequent data to extend beyond the viewport.
Second, demographics, with 60% of our operations team being Middle Eastern, we considered their natural right-to-left reading patterns. This cultural consideration aligned with their mental models of time flow and sequential actions.
Streamlining content curation
We redesigned the content curation workflow by introducing clear visual indicators for updated content. A new card component enabled quick decision-making, allowing users to accept or reject changes at a glance efficiently.
Field-level highlighting showed exactly what had changed, eliminating the need to hunt for updates. This visual approach helped users quickly identify and act on modifications, significantly reducing the time spent on content review.
Unified product preview
We integrated a product preview feature that mirrors the customer-facing product page view . This interface component displays both the public product presentation and crucial pipeline status information, eliminating the need to switch between systems.
By bringing the customer view into the workflow, team members can now validate product presentation and track sales status in context, streamlining the review process and ensuring accuracy of customer-facing content.
Transparency and accountability
The activity log provides complete transparency of content changes across the system. Users can track what was modified, when changes occurred, and which team member made each update, creating a clear audit trail of all content modifications.
Outcomes
Impact and Insights
We achieved significant operational improvements through continuous iteration and close collaboration with the Operations and Sales teams.
The workflow optimization reduced the average time spent per vehicle publishing from 8 hours to 30 minutes while improving the efficiency of recurring tasks by over 200%. Critically, operations gained independence from engineering for routine tasks and gained space to add value to the business. The project evolved beyond its initial scope of solving operational challenges. By observing the interaction between Operations and Sales teams, we identified an opportunity to streamline the sales process. Enabling direct offer creation from the inventory view accelerated lead response times and expanded business opportunities.
Key learnings
The positive impact of this project emphasized the importance of active observation and continuous improvement. Understanding the context and mental models of the diverse people using our product allows us to be more efficient and objective; rather than creating separate processes for different user groups, we discover by mapping their routine tasks and struggles, that well-designed versatile workflows could effectively serve multiple contexts. This approach improved efficiency and enhanced cross-departmental collaboration and system scalability.
The project demonstrated that isolated operational improvements can cascade into broader business benefits when teams have the right tools and autonomy to perform their core functions.
Contact
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