VDWeb
A General Motors Enterpise Project
The Project
VDWeb is a Brazilian dealership portal used by Brazilian GM vehicle dealerships to purchase vehicles from GM with government approval. The project, currently built on Oracle, is in dire need of a revamp- users report it as a confusing mess of forms and fields that feels completely dated. The goal is to streamline the user flow and rebuild the software using Microsoft Dynamics, leveraging any out-of-box capabilities of Dynamics has.
The Users
The average users for VDWeb are GM Dealership Owners, Brazilian government employees, and internal General Motors employees. When preparing to design VDWeb, it’s important to take into account the needs and frustrations of these users and creating personas for each of these users. This is one example of the personas I created for this project.
The Process
The design process followed the typical Agile development cycle; I would create a mockup, and pitch it to developers, who would then provide feedback so I could iterate again and pitch again. This started from simple wireframes and continued until I had high-fidelity prototypes. The feedback I recieved on the designs all stressed the importance of streamlining the creation process for government-sponsored discounts (called opportunities) as this flow served as the backbone for the whole site.
*Please note this is a general mockup of my work, as General Motors holds the rights to the actual project.
The Result
After numerous iterations, I reached a design that felt much cleaner than the product before it. It had streamlined the opportunity creation process, utilized as much out-of-box Microsoft Dynamics features as possible, it was far more readable and organized, and it provided all the requested functionality from user stories and stakeholders.
The Challenges
This was a very complex project. Simply having to unpack it and figure out what this project did took quite a while, especially since the original software was in Portuguese. Finding ways to condense or eliminate all of the unnecessary forms and fields (there were hundreds of input boxes in the original design) was extremely tricky, and required a lot of discussion between the GM Brazil business team and I. Additionally, finding a way to make this project look more eyecatching while remaining within the limitations of Microsoft Dynamics was tricky.