← BACKOVERVIEW

CAPITAL ONE · 2024–2025 · FINTECH / PLATFORM/MARK OF DISTINCTION · 2025

Car Buying Hub

Connecting online and in-store car buying so shoppers can move seamlessly between channels, while dealers see their progress, financing, documents, and readiness at every step.

The Car Buying Hub journey across five connected steps — explore and get pre-qualified on the web, build a deal, continue on mobile, prepare documents, and arrive in store — following one 2024 GMC Yukon deal from laptop to dealership.
ONE CONNECTED JOURNEY — EXPLORE, BUILD, CONTINUE, PREPARE, AND DRIVE ACROSS WEB, MOBILE, AND IN-STORE
ROLE
Product Design Leader
TIMELINE
2024–2025
PLATFORM / SCOPE
Responsive web · Shopper + dealer

The vehicle purchase was split across disconnected tools — shoppers configured a car in one place, applied for financing in another, and then started over at the dealership. Car Buying Hub reframed the purchase as a single connected system: one place to build a deal, carry it forward, and finalize it online, with the flexibility for dealers to pick up the journey wherever it left off.

01/THE PROBLEM

Buying a car online fell apart the moment the deal got real.

Financing, trade-in, add-ons, and the dealer hand-off each lived in their own silo. Shoppers lost their progress — and their confidence — at every seam.

02/MY APPROACH

The problem wasn’t any single screen. It was the space between them — the deal itself had no home.

  • Treat the deal as one persistent object across the entire journey
  • Let shoppers build and finalize a real, funded deal online
  • Give dealers the flexibility to resume the journey wherever it left off
Hand-drawn architecture diagram: the dealer web host delivering shared context to the Car Buying Hub and overlaid micro-frontends, with notes on back-button ownership and dynamic header titles.
ARCHITECTURE — THE DEAL AS ONE OBJECT PASSED BETWEEN HOST AND MICRO-FRONTENDS

03/THE SOLUTION

Car Buying Hub became the connected surface where a deal is assembled, financed, and carried to close.

  • A single deal that persists across shopping, financing, and trade-in
  • Financing and add-ons built into the buying flow, not bolted on after
  • A hand-off that lets dealers continue the exact deal a shopper built
THE CONNECTED JOURNEY — ONLINE SHOPPING THROUGH TO FINALIZING IN STORE

04/IMPACT

Financing became part of the decision, not an afterthought.

With one deal holding together end to end, shoppers treated financing and add-ons as real choices — and credit applications ran well past target.

+62%
FINANCING ENGAGEMENT
+126%
ADD-ON ADOPTION
~3×
CREDIT APPLICATIONS VS. TARGET

REFLECTION

The work changed how I think about product design.

The hardest UX problems aren't always on the screen.

Once the deal became one persistent object, the disconnected experience started disappearing.

Senior design is often deciding what the system should be — not just how it should look.

NEXT PROJECT

Re-Engage

Designing what happens when AI starts acting — a system for giving an AI sales agent enough autonomy to be useful, while keeping people in control of when, how, and why it acts.