Simplifying a fragmented vehicle purchase process
Turning a fragmented vehicle purchase process into one guided experience
UX/UI Design · UX Research · UX Strategy · Information Architecture · Interaction Design · Prototyping
CLIENT
Mercedes-Benz Financial Services
YEAR
2025
SERVICES
UX/UI Design · UX Research · UX Strategy
INDUSTRY
Automotive
Overview
For customers purchasing their Mercedes-Benz at the end of a lease, completing the transaction was only part of the experience. Behind the purchase were documentation requirements, title processing, dependencies, and steps that could vary based on the customer's situation. I worked across research, journey mapping, information architecture, interaction design, and high-fidelity UI to create a clearer experience around that complexity.
The challenge
Customers were navigating a process they couldn't see.
Customers could complete individual actions without understanding how those actions fit into the larger vehicle-purchase journey.
Important information was fragmented across different moments, making basic questions difficult to answer:
Where am I in the process?
What do I need to do?
What is Mercedes-Benz doing?
What happens next?
And because requirements could change depending on the customer's circumstances, simply displaying everything upfront would create a different problem: information overload.
Approach
Understanding the system before redesigning the interface
I mapped the end-to-end purchase experience to understand how customer actions, documentation, title processing, and internal dependencies connected.
That process surfaced 10+ points of friction.
Rather than addressing each pain point with an individual UI fix, I grouped them into broader experience problems.
Progress wasn't visible.
Customers lacked a reliable mental model for understanding where they were in the overall process.
Requirements depended on context.
Different circumstances created different documentation and guidance needs.
Completing a step didn't eliminate uncertainty.
Even after taking action, customers couldn't always tell who owned the next step or what would happen next.
Key Decisions
01 — Organize the experience around customer progress
The underlying process contained many operational stages, but reproducing the internal workflow in the UI would require customers to understand Mercedes-Benz's systems.
Instead, I organized the experience around customer-recognizable milestones.
A persistent stepper gave customers a clear mental model of completed, current, and upcoming stages without requiring them to remember where they had left off.
[IMAGE — early progress concepts → final stepper]
02 — Create one source of truth
Status, requirements, documentation, and next actions needed to feel connected.
I established a clearer information hierarchy that brought these elements together so customers could understand their current situation without piecing together information across disconnected touchpoints.
The hierarchy emphasized:
Current status → Required action → Supporting information → Documentation
[IMAGE — annotated main status/dashboard screen]
03 — Reveal complexity when it becomes relevant
Supporting different circumstances didn't mean every customer needed to see every possible rule.
I designed contextual guidance that surfaced information and requirements at the stage where they became useful.
This allowed the experience to accommodate underlying complexity without making the primary journey feel equally complex.
[IMAGE — contextual document/guidance states]
The Solution
One guided experience for a process with many possible paths
The resulting experience gave customers a persistent understanding of where they were, what was required, and what would happen next.
Rather than eliminating the complexity behind vehicle purchase and title processing, the interface translated that complexity into a journey customers could understand.
Impact
15+ points of friction synthesized into a unified experience model
The redesign moved the experience from:
Fragmented information → Centralized guidance
Unclear status → Visible progress
Disconnected requirements → Contextual information
Uncertain next steps → Explicit actions
Reflection
Complexity doesn't need to disappear. It needs to become understandable.
This project reinforced that simplification doesn't always mean removing information.
For complex workflows, clarity often comes from creating the right mental model and revealing the right information at the moment it becomes useful.