UX audit: Cars page search filters
Turners Automotive Group
Role
Product Lead
Timeline
Oct 2023 - May 2025
Tasks
Heuristic analysis
Competitor research
User flows
Wireframes
Tools
Figma
Figjam
JIRA
Confluence
Turners is a Kiwi household name when it comes to buying and selling used cars. First opening in 1967 in downtown Auckland, they're now the largest used vehicle dealer in the country with branches from Whangarei to Invercargill.
The project
Conducting a usability review of the Cars page search filters
The challenge
Identifying heuristic improvements for a high-traffic feature
The search filters is a high-traffic feature that's crucial for many customer journeys to find the right car for their needs. Additionally, there is a feature to save multiple sets of filters to the website user's account and receive email or SMS notifications when new matches are found.
I conducted a UX audit to identify heuristic improvements we could make for the Cars search page roadmap of the redesign project, and presented this in a report to senior leadership sponsoring the project.
Ideation
Recommendations based on best practice principles and competitor research
While the existing UI already follows some heuristic best practices for web forms and search filters, there are clearly opportunities for simplification. For example, removing the duplicated Save Search button, applying better information hierarchy, and refining labels and messages to better reflect system status.
Analysis of the search experience in competitors such as Trade Me and Cars Guide helped to round out the UX audit.
Example of competitor research of search filters. Trade Me's filter UI pattern doubles up to show the applied filters.
The fun part
Applying recommendations to low-fidelity prototypes
Based on the UX audit and competitor research, I created low-fidelity prototypes with the last two options being iterations that could be included in the future roadmap, if not the current one.
Reflection
An opportunity to round out the usability of search filters
While the current Turners website has served the business and its customers for many years, the redesign project was a great opportunity to round out the search filter experience with usability improvements. By applying best practice heuristic principles, these improvements will lower cognitive load of applying and saving filters to meet the needs of Turners customers who are looking for their ideal cars.
A cool thing I learnt
The devs introduced me to Swagger, a tool they used to document APIs. For the redesign project, I referred to Swagger often to map which API calls were needed at certain points in the user flow diagrams I created as part of writing the frontend requirements. This contributed to keeping track of the many UI component states and information variants for a sale method (of which there are also many!).
My favourite thing about Priscilla’s UX/UI work is how logical and well‑reasoned it is. Every decision has a purpose, whether grounded in best practice, user research, or competitor analysis.
She took the time to understand the limits of our Angular implementation, our backend API, the data produced by our ERP, and our testing and deployment processes. She also understood the practical constraints of translating our Figma designs into real-world development.
I’ve been at Turners for 14 years, and of all the colleagues who have moved on, Priscilla left the biggest gap in our team. I cannot recommend her highly enough.
Chris Bennett
Senior Software Engineer
Worked together at Turners Automotive Group