Fun Fact #2: Before joining Hi, Mileage, William C. Kuhlke was a band member
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Our Project Road Trip

Our process Problem space Exploratory research Generative research Future directions
How did we come to understand the world of used cars, conversational agents, and where they overlap?

Understanding Car Buying & Conversation

To tackle the challenge of integrating a conversational agent into this complex service we first focused on understanding how the current car buying experience exists today and the opportunities afforded by conversational technology.

CarMax and Car Buying

When looking at the used car buying experience we focused on understanding customers’ needs and motivations for purchasing a used car, how CarMax currently helps them do that, and how the CarMax process compares and contrasts with competitors in the field.

Complex
The used car buying experience is non-linear. People enter at different points and with different levels of knowledge.
Variable
Customers vary heavily in their needs and motivations when looking for the “right” car.
Competitive
Competitors are taking different approaches to facilitating this process (fully online services vs hybrid offerings).

What is conversation?

We decided to engage experts in the field of conversation design and conversational agents to help us understand more about different kinds of conversation methods, the effectiveness of agent embodiments, when to use verbal and text-based interaction, and factors that affect engagement with the agent and a person’s willingness to disclose personal information.

How can we successfully apply a conversational agent to a service that extends across contexts and modalities?

Who is this agent?
Attaching a persona to the conversational agent can impact how effectively it can change modalities
Who does it work for?
Users will interact with the agent differently if they perceive that the agent has their best interests in mind.
Honesty is key
Conversational agents will inevitably fail.  How our agent handles failure will strongly influence the user’s trust.
Who is in charge?
Who leads in the interaction between a person and a conversational agent
Build trust
Think about how to build trust in the end to end car buying process
Experiential Prototype

Understanding Car Buying & Conversation

Compared to traditional interfaces, conversational agents are much more experiential in nature. So, we decided to increase our knowledge about them by conducting research through design. We created an experiential prototype of a car buying service driven by a WOZ conversational agent.

Our goal was to answer:
Would people use a fully conversational agent to buy a car and how do they actually perceive and interact with it?

Findings

People are open to a conversational agent helping them find and purchase a car
The feeling of control is important to participants when learning from a conversational agent
The agent’s identity influenced how participants interacted with it
Participants will cease interacting with an agent that does not seem “intelligent”