Case Study: AutoTrader.com achieves 80% time savings and more customer-centric experiences with UserTesting's Live Conversation

Autotrader.com improves experience to better match customer journey and digital behaviors

Autotrader, the leading third‑party car shopping site, faced a core UX challenge: car buying is a complex, high‑stakes process and the lean product team—without a customer list or budget for consultants—was making design decisions based on assumptions rather than real buyer behavior. Senior UX researcher Bradley Miller needed a fast, affordable way to understand the many variations of the customer journey and overcome institutional myths about how shoppers find and use the site.

Using UserTesting’s Live Conversation to conduct remote interviews with recent car buyers across the country, Autotrader quickly gathered rich, real‑time insights that revealed shoppers typically start with search engines and land on individual pages without prior context. The work delivered major time and cost savings (an 80% reduction in time investment), dispelled false assumptions, validated SEO priorities, and shifted the team toward more empathetic, customer‑centric design.

AutoTrader.com

Bradley Miller

Senior User Experience Researcher