Empowering Carvana employees to track 1M papers and save $4.5M
Drove the design of a web application for 250 employees to track 1M documents annually. After it is built, it is projected to save the business $4.5M.
Design 0–1 on Carma
I drove end-to-end experiences on Carma, Carvana's internal employee software, working on a highly agile team to build asset tracking tools within Titles, a suite of applications used by specialists to track the assets that enable Carvana to legally sell cars.
Carma needs car titles to resell cars that we acquire from customers. This is called “Sell to Carvana” (STC). An important part of the business, STC powers about 90% of Carvana's inventory acquisitions. It's the second highest revenue stream for the business!
Specialists (users) focus on tracking legal documents (assets), to obtain a title. A title is a legal document that establishes proof of ownership. In this case, we needed titles that listed Carvana as the owner.
Digitize the tracking of 1M papers
While shadowing users, the team saw specialists physically tracking the movement of a high volume of documents daily, sent and received from company buildings, financial institutions, and customers. Annually, this amounted to 1M+ papers, moved through a tedious, slow, error-prone process.
I made design decisions to optimize efficiency for users.
After doing a MoSCoW exercise, the team scoped three key experiences:
Users' workflows were highly physical, so I had to factor this into design decisions:
I conducted remote interviews on current workflows and needs. Two themes emerged:
These insights shaped ideation, alongside design reviews and stakeholder discussions.
While workflows involve physical tasks, for simplicity purposes, I am only showing digital flows:
Users wanted to see the total number of assets per category, not a single % of work completed.
Optimizing efficiency and reliability
Originally I envisioned 3 separate screens. Manage would act as the landing page with 2 modes to access the different experiences. However, the potential user value did not seem to be greater than engineering lift. So, I decided to locate Work within Manage. Therefore, MVP would consist of 2 screens.
Since the views are nearly identical for each mode, see this single visual:
The below diagram shows key screens in high-fidelity, along with key interactions and screen functionality.
Delivering measurable savings and efficiency
This solution is projected to save ~$1.61/employee. Since each employee pulls thousands of documents daily, this totals ~$4.5M in annual cost savings for Carvana. Additionally, employee speed is projected to increase. Ideally, with more time, users are empowered to spend their time and energy on higher-value tasks.
As of November 2022, the designs were delivered to be built by our engineers.
We received positive signal during our final rounds of user testing. Users were excited for this to launch:
Since designs were being built as I left Carvana, I'd be curious to assess performance against fulfillment time and failure rate, then explore extending this thinking to other tools in the app as new data becomes available.
While at Carvana, I:
By the time I left, design had made progress digitizing work that directly impacts the bottom line, amplifying a previously unheard part of an org of ~18k employees.
If you're designing for the people who keep a business running, let's chat.
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