In early 2025, I led the transformation of Motorway's post-sale experience, cutting support enquiries by 32%, dealer-contact issues by 27%, and driving 56% organic adoption, while establishing the org's trust & transparency strategy.

Motorway is the UK's fastest-growing used-car marketplace, connecting over 500k sellers with verified dealers. Once a seller accepted an offer, they entered a high-uncertainty journey involving verification, logistics, inspection, negotiation and payment, but none of these steps had dedicated product surfaces. The result was an experience held together by phone calls, emails and operational guesswork.

The final screen in the seller journey had 4× more page views than the homepage. Sellers kept returning for updates that never came, anxious about a major asset they'd just sold. To understand the operational and emotional cost of this black box, I partnered with Customer Support and Data to audit seller tickets, buyer interactions, and workflow gaps. We uncovered systemic issues:

1. Zero in-product communication: 100% of sales relied on Whatsapp and phone calls
2. No guidance of predictable path: 56% of enquiries came from sellers unsure of next steps
3. Trust breaking at the highest-anxiety moment: 25% cancellation rate and climbing

I facilitated a cross-functional workshop mapping the end-to-end post-sale flow. For the first time, Product, Ops and Dealer teams saw the same system, bottlenecks, and ownership gaps. Parallel to this, I reviewed past work and UXR to understand how long clarity of sale status had been a problem.

Key takeaways

→ A long-standing problem with no single owner meant nobody was accountable for fixing the experience

→ Inconsistent language across touchpoints

→ Every sale required 3+ phone calls to progress the sale

→ The product experience effectively 'ended' after verification, with no updates, no guidance, and no sense of momentum

Sellers didn't know what to do, who they were waiting for, or whether the process was progressing normally. I asked: How might we turn a historically manual, opaque process into a transparent, self-serve experience that builds trust and scales operations? Three opportunity areas emerged:

1. Make every step legible: Sellers should always know what's happening, what's expected of them, and why

2. Reveal behind the scenes: Surface operational actions at the moment they matter.

3. Turn confusion into product: Convert the most common questions into product surfaces

The post-sale experience touched almost every part of the business but lacked a shared mental model. Each team held different assumptions about how the flow worked, who owned what, and what "good" looked like. To align the organisation, I created a vision storyboard grounded in user needs and commercial goals. It visualised a shared "north star" for trust and transparency.

Using insights from support tickets, dealer logs, ops workflows, and seller interviews, I defined and prioritised the hypotheses most likely to reduce cancellations and operational load:

1. Verified buyer & driver profiles to reduce the highest-friction anxiety moment

2. Time-based milestones to decrease ambiguity and lower late-stage cancellations

3. AI-assisted damage valuation to reduce negotiation disputes and justify price adjustments with evidence

I pitched the vision to the executive team as both a trust strategy and a long-term growth lever tied directly to cancellation rate, support volume and dealer satisfaction KPIs. It established a unified direction for the next 12–18 months.

I then partnered with the Head of Product and an Engineering Manager to translate the vision into a sequenced roadmap. Each phase built toward the long-term vision while delivering tangible wins every 4–6 weeks.

As the company shifted priorities, this vision became the foundation for a new product vertical dedicated to post-sale. This created the opportunity for me to lead design of the consumer side of the business, collaborating with three other designers across adjacent teams. Below is the work my team shipped:

The verification screen became the obvious starting point: the surface already existed, and was where the journey effectively "ended". Crucially, it required no backend engineering, allowing us to deliver value immediately while engineering focused on validating the events architecture needed for the full vision.

An important consideration for this screen was communicating what happened after verification. Different buyers followed different workflows: some arranged their own transport, while others used Motorway Move, our paid service we planned to support in-product for the first time. I worked with Content and Ops to develop language that supported both scenarios, giving sellers a clearer understanding of what collection day looks like regardless of transport path.

We immediately saw less people refreshing and navigating through the site trying to find the next step, which validated that clearer sequencing and upfront expectation-setting directly reduced confusion. Both buyers and agents reported fewer enquiries, a huge win for both the org, sellers, and buyers.

The next project we sequenced was a refresh of how we handled a successful verification. Previously, sellers who passed verification landed on a static "Sale confirmed" screen. It was designed to feel celebratory but instead felt like a dead end which gave no context on what to do next.

I designed an intercept screen to transform this ambiguous moment into a guided handoff. It needed to accommodate multiple dealer workflows and set clear expectations before sellers entered the existing handover experience.

Next came the task of defining the new surfaces and information hierarchy across the post-sale journey. There were dozens of backend events that we could display, but our sellers didn't from internal logistics states, I felt it was essential to keep the milestones aligned to predictable steps that online shoppers are already familiar with, and to show momentum.

Through iteration, we identified four seller-centred moments that were stable regardless of operational complexity:

1. Preparing your collection: User needs to choose a collection date
2. Collection confirmed: Partner allocation happening behind the scenes.
3. Collection underway: Driver is en-route or started collection
4. Payment: Inspection complete, payment has been made.

However, early explorations showed that milestones break if you try to stuff operational context inside them. We needed a structure that preserved the clarity of the milestones while still giving sellers the context they needed at critical moments.

To achieve this, I reframed the milestone bar as sacred: a place for only status and time expectations. Everything else—contextual updates, time-based changes, or actions—needed to live elsewhere. This clarity let us reset the information architecture into 3 layers

I had an idea of a guidance module: a lightweight, contextual surface that appears only when the seller needs clarity or direction. It's designed around three content categories, each tied to a specific moment in the journey and a specific type of behaviour we needed to support.

To reinforce its role, the guidance module adopts a notification-bar–style treatment that distinguishes time-sensitive context from the more permanent data surfaces beneath it.

The module later became a shared pattern adopted by Payments to surface negative-equity cases, validating the hierarchy and proving the design decision scaled across new operational moments without adding noise to the core journey.

The post sale experience launched in Q2 2025 without any CRM or marketing. The project helped define Motorways trust and transparency vision, and created an entirely new product vertical. See the desktop experience below:

This was an extremely satisfying project for me. It reshaped how I think about vision, influence, and designing inside a scaling organisation. At the time, the company was prioritising our transport product, which only served a small subset of sellers. Looking back, I would build around a core journey for all sellers from the start, but I'm glad we structured the work in modular releases that still delivered meaningful improvements despite shifting priorities.

The hardest part was finding the product truth across a landscape full of operational nuance, exceptions, and legacy behaviours. I often had to advocate for building the future we wanted rather than mirroring the present, and that pushed me to become more confident in making principled product decisions.

What surprised me most was how long this problem had existed in research without being prioritised. The breakthrough was a vision storyboard that focused on the why and the what, not the how. It taught me that strategic storytelling is as critical as design craft.