Auto Trader

What is Auto Trader?

Auto Trader is the UK's largest automotive marketplace, with millions of consumers using the platform to find their next vehicle, the quality of the consumer experience is directly tied to the value Auto Trader provides to the dealers who rely on it as a key partner in their business.

When I joined in 2019, the business had a strong market position and a product organisation with real ambition to improve and modernise the consumer experience. It was a well-timed moment to get involved.

My Role

I joined as Principal Designer, initially focused on a specific brief: launching Auto Trader's new leasing product. The work I took on grew naturally from there.

By the time I left two years later, I had founded Auto Trader's first design system, led the rebuild and expansion of the design team following a significant organisational change, and collaborated closely with leadership to evolve the product and design ways of working across the business. I was responsible for the consumer experience across website and app, working closely with the Product Director to define and deliver a research-led redesign of the full end-to-end journey.

A New Product and a Broader Opportunity

Auto Trader's leasing proposition was a meaningful expansion of the business model. The platform had historically facilitated car sales. Leasing represented a growing segment of consumer demand and a new revenue stream, with Auto Trader acting as the broker in the deal. It was a genuinely greenfield project, built in collaboration with dealers and finance partners, and it needed to be designed from the ground up.

I started by establishing who we were designing for. Combining new leasing-specific research with existing knowledge about Auto Trader's customer base, I identified key user segments and created a set of personas grounded in both behavioural data and attitudinal insight. Partner companies in the leasing and finance space shared data that added further depth, giving us a richer picture of how people approach leasing than Auto Trader had previously had access to. The Personal Leaser persona, for example, revealed that while 9 in 10 users come in with a car in mind, two thirds change their mind during the process — a finding that directly shaped how we thought about discovery and flexibility in the experience.

From there, we ran a series of discovery and definition sprints. One of the things I pushed for early on was bringing developers into the design process as active participants rather than recipients of handoff. This was a new way of working for Auto Trader and it made a real difference — collaborative sketching sessions produced a broader range of ideas, created shared ownership of the direction, and reduced the friction between design and build later in the project.

The sprints kept a deliberate focus on core jobs to be done rather than features, making sure the experience we were designing was built around what users were actually trying to achieve at each step.

The leasing product launched successfully and we later integrated leasing options into new car details pages alongside cash and finance, giving users a complete picture of how they could acquire a vehicle in one place. Alongside the product work, the experience of designing from scratch without a shared component library gave me a clear view of an opportunity for the wider organisation.

Building ATDS (Auto Trader Design System)

I started working informally with the lead front-end engineer to scope what a shared system would take. We audited the existing component landscape, built the first examples, and put together a case for investment. Getting formal backing meant making the case before the business had prioritised it, so the early work was done side-of-desk.

The timing then worked in our favour. A rebrand had been in flight before I joined, developed with an external agency, and the rollout created a natural opportunity to implement the system across the product at scale. Rather than a manual rollout across dozens of disconnected surfaces, the rebrand became the implementation vehicle for ATDS. New visual decisions were codified as tokens and components from the outset, and the system rolled out across the product as the rebrand did.

Every product squad moved onto ATDS as soon as it was available, with no slow rollout or period of parallel working. The system became the foundation for the rebrand and for everything that followed. Designers were working from a shared language for the first time. Engineers had a consistent vocabulary to build against. And the team had the infrastructure it needed to move faster on the work ahead.

Rebuilding the Design Team

While ATDS was being embedded, Auto Trader was navigating a significant organisational change. The Head of Design was departing and the executive team had decided to relocate the London design function to the Manchester headquarters. I was the only designer already based in Manchester, and given my background leading design teams at Booking.com, I was asked to take on the hiring and team formation work.

The London team had been around ten people, all product designers. We took the opportunity to rethink the shape of the function and build something more rounded. We expanded the scope to bring in dedicated research, content design, and visual and brand design capability alongside product design.

This team change naturally gave me an opportunity to move into a broader role. I was able to hand over the leasing product work to a new product designer, and I shifted my focus to the wider consumer experience and the design function as a whole, taking on a different role as a Design Manager.

Redesigning the Core Experience

With the team in place and the design system providing a solid foundation, I worked closely with the Product Director to look at the consumer experience with fresh eyes. Auto Trader's core journey had evolved organically over many years and there was a real opportunity to improve it significantly. We started with a series of workshops to map the end-to-end experience against research and data insights, identifying the highest-impact areas to focus on first.

A key part of that work was establishing a shared understanding of who we were actually designing for. Auto Trader's user base spans an unusually wide range, from the occasional buyer who just wants something reliable and affordable, to the highly informed enthusiast or trade professional who visits the site regularly and knows exactly what they're looking for. Designing for an average of those people serves none of them well.

From the research we defined three archetypes that became the team's shared frame of reference across design and product decisions:

These archetypes weren't just a research output. They became an active design decision tool, giving us a principled frame to work from when debating how to prioritise features or surface information across the journey.

The approach we took to the redesign was deliberately iterative rather than a single large-scale release. This was partly pragmatic, as a full cutover at Auto Trader's scale carries significant risk. But it was also a conscious effort to shift how the wider product organisation thought about design and delivery.

Auto Trader had A/B testing infrastructure in place and I could see the opportunity to significantly raise how the business used it. Drawing on what I'd learned running experimentation at Booking.com, I worked with the Product Director to embed a more rigorous approach. The principle we established was that every meaningful change is a test, and every test should be grounded in a clear hypothesis, a defined success metric, and a documented risk assessment. This changed the quality of conversations between design, product, and engineering, and gave the design team a more credible voice in product decisions because we were speaking the same language as the data and analytics functions.

The result was a sustained high cadence of well-structured experiments across the core journey. Rather than waiting for a big-bang redesign to prove its value, we were generating evidence continuously, shipping improvements as they were validated, and building an organisational understanding that design decisions should be measurable.

Conclusion

The two years at Auto Trader covered a lot of ground. A new product, a new design system, a new team, and a redesigned consumer experience. What tied it together was a consistent approach: looking beyond the immediate brief to understand what would actually move things forward, then going and doing it.

Each project built on the last. The leasing work created the impetus for the design system. ATDS enabled the rebrand and unlocked delivery speed across the organisation. The team rebuild brought the specialist capability needed for the research work. The research work made the redesign principled and evidence-led. The experimentation culture made the impact of that work legible to the business.

None of that compounding effect happened by accident. It came from consistently looking for the upstream opportunity and being willing to go after it, even when it was outside the original brief.