Project Background

PureCars was the company behind this project, and they acquired AutoSigma to boost their digital marketing services. At its core, AutoSigma is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform built for car dealerships. It helps dealers and their agency partners quickly create, update, and deploy marketing materials across different channels, all from a central dashboard for monitoring and approval. Both salespeople and designers were using the platform, so we needed to strike the right balance between making it easy to use and offering enough high-level design options.

Our daily team was made up of the product owner, the lead engineer, and the lead graphic designer (who also doubled as a test user).

Context

Working as the only designer on the team (well, UX designer at least), I put together all of the wireframes and screens for this project. Don't get me wrong - the team was beyond capable, helpful and we put some brilliant things together - but the pixel pushing was on me.

Discover, Define, Design, Deliver

...is a clever little alliteration or memory device or whatever. It doesn't always work exactly that way, but you try to do something close. We actually did it this time!

User Research

A glorious convenience: users who work at your company!

Since I was coming in to design for an existing team and product, there was already some user research done and documented. We had a pretty solid understanding of our main personas—mostly sales associates, GMs, marketing professionals, and agency designers.

But there was one resource we hadn’t tapped into yet: the actual users! We had an entire department of designers using the tool to create banners, ads, and other materials for our clients. So, I set up a whiteboard session with the team to get their input. We talked through the current issues with the tool, what they’d like to see, where the bottlenecks were, and so on. Then, to really make sure they didn’t love me too much, I gave them homework: record themselves using the tool to complete a common task the next week.

User Profiles

Manager

General Manager or Sales Manager, possibly Sales Associates

Manage current ads
View reports and digital distribution information
Manage ad status and approvals

Designer

Graphic Designer at marketing company or in-house at larger dealer group

Use design tool to produce new digital assets
Monitor and makes edits based on status and approvals
Manage brand assets

Define Needs/Issues

How can we make our coworkers' lives easier?

From our research—and from users flat-out telling us—we knew this big update needed to tackle a few key things: making it easier to update and replicate designs, adding templating and saved designs, and improving asset management. Funny enough, most of these updates were actually focused on the admin/profile area of the app, not the design tool itself (though the design tool was getting a much-needed overhaul too).

Brainstorming & Wireframes

We all know this is the meat an potatoes section of what we do. Starting with a plain, black and white version of what you are going to build allows you to really see what you are working with.

Team Workshop

Even though I was the only designer on the project, I definitely wasn’t the only one working to make this tool smooth and functional for our users. During the research and definition phases, our UX Researchers and Product Owner were super involved. Then, for this stage, we brought in some extra firepower. Over three days, we held a workshop with me, the UX Researchers, the Product Owner, and our Lead Graphic Designer (who also happened to be a user). That let us call this co-designing, which was a nice bonus.

Our design brief gave us clear goals: streamline the process of duplicating designs, improve overall asset handling, and completely overhaul the UI. Since asset management and design duplication were so closely tied, we started with assets. We mapped out the hierarchy of assets, dividing them into Manufacturer, OEM, Regional, Dealer Groups, and individual Dealerships. Each level overrode the one before it, so it made the most sense to go with a tiered approach for both users and assets.

Wireframing

After our initial brainstorming, we moved on to rough sketches, and some pretty solid solutions started to take shape. At this stage, we sketched everything out—even the bad ideas. Honestly, we learned something from every attempt, so we just kept going until we felt like we’d explored all the possibilities.

Co-designing during this phase was an absolute game-changer. Having a user in the room—who also happened to be an expert—meant we could test ideas in real-time as we came up with them. It was amazing to watch it all come together!

By the last day of the workshop, we had some solid ideas on paper. So, I took a little time to bring some of our sketches into Figma, creating mid-fi wireframes with just a bit of interaction. This gave us a digital asset we could share with other stakeholders and get their feedback.

The wireframing process produced a lot of screens, mostly because we were able to build them out so quickly. Having sketches on hand for the major screens allowed us to quickly put those together and focus on the interactions from there.

Screens

Finally getting to look and feel

Dashboard

Our goal with the dashboard was to give General Managers and Sales Managers a quick overview of current campaigns and their statuses, as well as a place to make any branding or overview updates as well.

Brand Management

Branding control was a big thing for managers and designers alike. For designers, control over the default typography was important, and managers would frequently need to change logos for promos across all digital marketing. In one quick screen you have control across all tiers of branding depending on your user level. Regional and OEM users can change the logo for the entire platform at the click of a button, while dealer users can control their override image - and select when to apply it.

Asset Management

Delivery & Iteration

For this project we designed the hi-fidelity prototypes in Figma and used InVision for sharing and getting feedback on interfaces as we went through different iteration. Having users in-house was again a huge facilitator in getting this done on a tight timeline. We could make updates to screens and we would typically get at least a few responses that day if it wasn't too late - almost working with real-time feedback!

Reflection

While being the only hands-on designer on the team was a challenge I hadn't tackled in some time, I loved the flexibility to explore different solutions before presenting solutions. Getting to really put some time into screens like login and settings that usually get left until the end was also a nice change in pace (aided by the team working great together and hitting timelines).

The project is currently in development and I'm excited to see and share the final product!

Autosigma: In-browser Design Tool & DAM

PureCars

Role

Skills & Tools