Overview
Tori Autot set out to become Finland’s leading second-hand car marketplace. I led product design within a mostly technical team, helping embed a user-centred approach across a fast-paced project and the wider organisation.
My role covered research, user journeys and flows, experience design, and prototyping. I combined insights from user testing and interviews with analytics data to inform and explain our design decisions. Together, we built a way of working around shared goals, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Timeline
- 2021 — 2022
Project highlights
Product design & collaboration
- Leading design from initial hypotheses to launch and iteration
- Combining user research, analytics, and A/B testing
- Connecting design and development around shared business goals
Impact
- 30% reduction in ad creation time over first iteration
- Over 60,000 cars listed and 670,000 unique monthly visitors
- Extending the collaborative approach into the wider Tori web renewal
The challenge
Legacy systems and established ways of working had stalled previous renewal efforts across Tori. Tori Autot had a strong business case, but launching a brand-new service also required a more collaborative way for design and engineering to test ideas and make decisions.
The opportunity: How could we launch the renewed service and build a shared practice of experimentation and learning from real usage?
Launching and learning
We started with a focused set of hypotheses for the car listing and ad pages. After 6 months, we launched a lightweight first version to test them.
Once live, we built an outcome-focused way of working, combining research, analytics, and A/B testing to guide improvements. Shared quarterly objectives kept the team focused on results, while weekly reviews helped us turn findings into decisions.
Sharing user and usage insights with the whole team encouraged everyone to contribute ideas, rather than treating design as a handover to developers. For example, developers proposed using image recognition to read licence plates from uploaded photos and make ad creation easier. We explored the idea together through quick prototypes.
- Design
- Dev
- QA
Long feedback loop
- Design
- Design
- Dev
- QA
Reduced feedback loop
Your impact has been huge! Overall design thinking and how to improve it. You are true professional and capable person. You have eagerness to learn all the time and improve your and others ways of working.
Making car ads faster to create
Incremental A/B tests improved the ad creation flow until progress levelled off. We then tested a bigger change: a single-page form with most car details already filled in.
Sellers uploaded photos, image recognition identified the licence plate, and registration data populated the form. They only needed to add the price, description, and mileage before reviewing and publishing.
The redesigned flow reduced ad creation time by 30%, while maintaining ad quality.
Outcome & impact
A year after launch, Tori Autot had over 60,000 cars listed at a time and attracted 670,000 unique visitors per month.
Beyond the product, we established a collaborative practice of testing ideas against user needs and business goals. This approach continued into the wider Tori web renewal, where I went on to lead design.