Helping professional vehicle buyers find and act on the right inventory

Car dealerships regularly take vehicles in trade that do not make sense for their own used-car lots. A Toyota dealership might accept a BMW to complete a sale, for example, even if it does not want to stock that car or cannot offer as much for it as a BMW dealership might.

The Appraisal Lane gave dealerships another option. A dealer could photograph a trade-in, complete a condition report, and submit the vehicle through the app. Our appraisal team would review it and make a cash offer. The dealer could then decide how to use that offer in its transaction. If the dealer accepted it, The Appraisal Lane purchased the vehicle and needed to find the right buyer for it.

When I joined, professional buyers could view available inventory on a basic website and contact an account manager to discuss a vehicle or negotiate the listed price. The experience worked, but it expected buyers to keep checking the site. That did not fit how many of them worked.

Most of these buyers were not sitting at a desk all day. They were sourcing vehicles for independent used-car lots, dealership used-car departments, wholesale operations, or their own auctions. They also tended to have a sweet spot. One buyer might want late-model trucks under a certain mileage, while another might focus on a specific brand, body style, or price range.

We saw an opportunity to make that process more targeted and useful on a phone.

I was the Product Manager, but I was also the UX designer because we did not have one when the work began.

I defined the product with our leadership and domain experts, designed the iOS and Android experiences in Sketch, wrote epics and user stories in Confluence, and created Jira tickets across mobile, backend, and web administration work. I also scheduled implementation reviews with our senior architect and mobile engineers, incorporated their feedback, and worked with the team through sprint demos and release.

Engineering owned implementation and technical decisions. Customer-facing team members who worked with buyers handled account creation and onboarding because the app was publicly listed, but users could not create their own accounts.

We did not have a formal research practice, so I relied heavily on people inside the company who had direct experience buying and selling used vehicles.

Several members of the sales team had worked as used-car sales managers. One of our founders was a wholesale vehicle buyer who operated his own auction. I used their input to understand how buyers evaluated inventory, which attributes mattered, and whether the filters and vehicle views made sense for the way they worked.

This helped us move beyond the simpler lookup patterns in the dealer-facing product. A dealership submitting a vehicle might mainly need make, model, or VIN. A buyer deciding whether to stock it cared about more detail, including mileage, exterior color, interior or seat color, vehicle type, and pricing status.

Exploring the layout on paper

I used quick sketches to explore home-screen layouts and vehicle cards before refining the interface. These drawings capture alternatives for presenting inventory and the information within each card.

The action available to a buyer depended on where a vehicle was in the appraisal process. I used status chips and state-specific actions to make that distinction visible.

Before a vehicle had been appraised

A buyer could submit a pre-bid, meaning the amount they would pay if The Appraisal Lane acquired the vehicle. Multiple buyers could submit prices. Once submitted, a pre-bid could not be changed, so the interface needed to make that commitment clear before submission.

Those bids appeared in the internal appraisal portal, ranked from highest to lowest and identified by buyer. If a bid aligned with the value the appraisal team wanted to place on the vehicle, an appraiser could select it. We effectively had the vehicle pre-sold at that price, assuming the dealership accepted our offer.

Selecting a pre-bid did not complete a transaction by itself. The dealership still had to accept The Appraisal Lane's offer. If it declined, the vehicle did not enter our inventory and no sale occurred.

After a vehicle had a value

For inventory that had already been appraised or purchased, the app showed the price The Appraisal Lane was seeking, which included the margin the business was targeting at the time. A buyer could mark interest, contact our team through the built-in conversation flow, negotiate, and coordinate transportation if a deal was reached.

A pre-bid could remain useful even when it was not initially selected. If another deal fell through or the vehicle later entered inventory, the disposition team could see who had already expressed interest and continue the conversation.

If a purchase was agreed upon, transportation could follow one of two paths. The buyer could arrange it independently, or they could work through chat with an account manager or disposition team member and ask The Appraisal Lane to shop transportation rates using its network across different regions.

Exploring purchase and transportation

I also sketched a possible purchase flow with buyer information and transportation choices. This was an early concept, not a record of the final interaction. In the launched workflow described above, buyers and TAL coordinated the deal and transportation through conversations.

The pre-bid feature was not only a mobile interface. It crossed the entire product system.

The apps needed to submit a bid. The backend needed to store and return it. The administration portal needed to show all bids within the appraisal workflow and allow an appraiser to select one. The customer-facing team then needed enough context to follow up with the buyer.

I mapped that behavior across the products and broke the work into separate iOS, Android, API, and web tickets. I used Confluence to document the feature and its states, then reviewed it with the senior architect and engineers before the team committed to implementation.

That collaboration helped surface implementation constraints early while keeping the buyer experience and internal appraisal workflow connected.

Every two weeks, the team demonstrated completed work to stakeholders, including sales and other people who worked directly with buyers. As the apps approached release, I walked those teams through the experience so they could help approved buyers install the app, access their accounts, and configure useful saved filters.

We launched TAL Buyers Network in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Accounts were created internally, so the product remained limited to approved professional buyers rather than consumers browsing for personal vehicles.

I saw a small number of pre-bids come through after launch, but I left before we had reliable adoption or business-impact data. That early signal does not establish broader adoption or business impact.

The qualitative response was generally positive. People in automotive were accustomed to administrative products that felt old, slow, and difficult to use. Our software felt responsive, worked well on their phones, and stood out from the tools many of them dealt with every day. I do not have formal usability scores. A preserved launch-period review from GulfAuto provides a specific customer account, included in the outcomes below.

If I were continuing the product today, I would instrument the complete path from buyer preference to vehicle disposition:

• Saved-filter creation and the most frequently selected attributes
• Notification delivery, opens, and vehicle views
• The percentage of matching vehicles that receive interest or a pre-bid
• Pre-bids selected by the appraisal team
• Seller acceptance after a pre-bid is selected
• Completed sales to the buyer who submitted the selected bid
• Time from appraisal submission to disposition, compared with a pre-launch baseline

These measures would show whether buyers were finding relevant inventory, whether alerts were producing meaningful action, and whether that activity helped the business move vehicles faster.