VW Dealer Homepage
Prototyping – UX/UI – Optimization
The Goal
The goal was to improve the user experience of the Dealer Homepage by addressing pain points. This modular platform lets dealers customize their pages, but its flexibility often led to a cluttered page. I focused on simple optimizations that, together, made the platform more intuitive, engaging, and effective.
The Challenge
A key problem with the Dealer Homepage was its tendency to become overly long, as dealers often included too much information. This led to clutter, drop-off rates, and friction from unclear or redundant modules. The challenge was to introduce improvements, without overhauling the whole system.
Deliverables
Simplified and structured "Key Facts"
Enhanced customer reviews with paginated navigation
New photo gallery feature for increased emotional engagement
My Role
Identified pain points and optimization opportunities
Provided recommendations to improve the structure and usability of the website
Key Facts: Refining First Impressions
After: Quick digestable dealership info builds trust
Introduction
The welcome text module holds significant prominence, as it is positioned at the very beginning of the dealer homepage. Dealers often use this space to share insights about their business, including its history, values, and community involvement, creating an opportunity to engage customers right from the start.
Before: Lack of information about dealership makes it feel untrustworthy
Pain Point
Many dealers wrote overly long introductions, which created two problems:
the text overwhelmed users seeking quick, digestible information about the dealer
It occupied space on an already busy page without highlighting key details users wanted
Solution
To address this, I designed a "Key Facts" module as a structured alternative. This module allowed dealers to showcase their business highlights in a clear and concise way.
By offering a curated list of optional facts that aligned with user needs and dealer priorities, dealers could customize their presentations to emphasize what made them unique. Examples included:
Number of locations
Years of experience in the industry
Total number of employees
As a result, the updated design met both user and dealer needs: users could quickly find impactful information at a glance, while dealers had a better way to present their strengths in a visually stronger and structured format.
2. User Reviews: Breaking the Scroll Trap
After: Adding pages to reviews prevents endless scrolling
Introduction
Customer reviews are a vital trust signal for users, but the original reviews module created challenges that negatively impacted usability and lead to frustration.
Before: Endless scrolling through the reviews with no way to collapse them
Pain Point
While users could expand the customer reviews section continuously, to see more reviews, once expanded, they were not able collapse it again.
Naturally, this resulted in an excessively long page where a potentionally frustrated user needs to reload the entire page for the reviews to collapse back to normal.
Solution
To solve the issue, I redesigned the module to include pagination, replacing the "show more" button with a simple system that allowed users to browse reviews page by page.
This change made it easier for users to read and navigate through the reviews. Furthermore it prevents endless scrolling when wanting to read more reviews, thus making them more accessible and engaging for users.
3. Photo Gallery: Adding Emotional Context
After: A dynamic photo gallery enhances engagement and builds trust
Introduction
Visual content plays a crucial role in making a strong first impression. By allowing dealers to showcase multiple photos, the homepage could become more engaging and help users connect emotionally with the dealer.
Before: A single static image failed to engage users
Pain Point
Upon entering, the dealer homepage lacked visual appeal, relying on a single static image that fails to engage users or convey trust.
New visitors had no chance of seeing more than one image of the dealer on the homepage and struggled to form a positive impression of the dealer.
Solution
By introducing a dynamic photo gallery module that allowed dealers to upload and display multiple images, users would be able to browse through the gallery manually or view it as an autoplay slideshow.
This addition brought a new emotional dimension to the dealer homepages, enabling dealers to present their business in a visually compelling way while creating a more engaging user experience through Interactivity.
The Conclusion
One of the biggest challenges of the dealer home optimization was working within the constraint that the homepage design couldn't change too drastically, as the budget and timeline for implementation were limited. This meant I had to focus on optimizing existing elements rather than creating entirely new ones.
What I would do differently next time
If more time and resources had been available, I would have liked to propose a more comprehensive redesign of the top section of the homepage, where the welcome text and the adjacent "Leistungen" (“Services”) module are located. Ideally, the "Key Facts" module could fully replace the "Leistungen" module, which currently duplicates information already included in the CTA module below. This change would further declutter the homepage, creating a more streamlined experience for users while maintaining all relevant content.