After a successful initial period within the classic car and classic car parts marketplace business, they were looking to design, develop and execute a new platform that would truly differentiate themselves from the competition, and provide their users with a seamless user experience that would complement their brand.

Clasiq started their journey as a platform for listing classic cars to sell, but over the course of several years, they realised that there was an opportunity to bring innovative features to their platform to revolutionise the space.

Clasiq had started working on an initial prototype for their new platform internally, but after a number of user feedback sessions, it was clear that it needed further refinement in order to truly be successful.

With a number of product features within the roadmap, Clasiq needed a partner to assist in implementing their digital product offering, provide creative and technical direction, and ensure that their user experience was thorough, refined, built on highly scalable architecture that would grow with their business, and ready to engage their established audience of classic car enthusiasts.

One of the key areas of support Clasiq were looking for in building out their product was to replicate time-intensive analogue processes digitally. Such processes include providing a full end-to-end solution for pre-car inspection and valuations, providing a real-time auction experience, as well as storing funds within a secure escrow vault.

We worked directly with the founders to build out their vision by understanding their key user personas, establishing their target demographic and what drives them to engage, and detailing the business operations that are needed to facilitate the platform.

During our discovery phase, we developed over 500 user stories based on behaviour driven-development (BDD).

BDD promotes quick iterations, breaking down user problems into small, manageable pieces that flow smoothly through our development process. This allows us to work rapidly, addressing each aspect promptly and efficiently. By embracing this approach, we’re able to maximise the speed of our development process.

1) Encouraging teamwork across different roles to develop a shared understanding of the problem.
2) Adopting a fast-paced, iterative approach to gather feedback and maximise value.
3) Generating system documentation that undergoes automatic checks to align with the desired system's behaviour.
4) To make this happen, we prioritise collaborative work around practical, real-life examples that illustrate the desired system behaviour.

These examples serve as our guiding light, leading us from the initial concept all the way to implementation, with an unwavering commitment to continuous collaboration.

This was especially prevalent for building out Clasiq’s real-time auction product. In order to document the desired system behaviours, we travelled to a real-life classic car auction in Wales, England, to complete invaluable research. After spending several hours observing the processes involved in the real-life auction, we were able to document each step of the process that needed to be re-created digitally, identifying several challenges along the way that would need to be overcome.

Rapid prototyping

After the documentation has gathered, we used the process flows designed within the discovery phase to design the user interfaces of each touchpoint of the product. Collaborating with the stakeholders, established a design language that appealed to the target audience, that also set the tone of voice for all brand communications. We completed several design iterations of the product, completing real-life user testing with a variety of users that weren’t familiar with the business or product. This enabled us to gather extremely useful insights into what aspects of the UI required refining further, and which elements performed as expected.

System architecture

To facilitate the real-time auction element of the product, we utilised a technology called sockets. Sockets enables real-time communication by establishing connections between clients and servers, allowing the exchange of data in a continuous and bidirectional manner.

Through protocols like TCP or UDP and event-driven programming, sockets facilitate the seamless flow of information, making real-time applications such as a live auction possible. We used a combination of Node.js and React to build the platform using a decoupled microservices architecture methodology, in order to provide scalability, security and modularity.

We tested the live auction product through a number of different devices and connection speeds, throttling the performance in order to test the limitations of the actual auction bid speeds. This allowed us to simulate the different connection speeds that real-users would experience with varying internet connection speeds (3G, 4G and 5G GSM vs Wi-Fi/wired connections). Our simulations showed areas that could be improved, and we were able to use this data to enhance bid speed efficiency and reduce lag times significantly.

Iterative product improvements user testing and HotJar

After the product launched, we continued to improve it iteratively with the team, with the use of real-life analytics tools such as HotJar. By analysing the HotJar sessions, we were able to identify areas that could be improved in order to optimise user engagement further. Harnessing real-life data from the actual target demographic proved to be very insightful and enabled us to guide key decisions.

After a successful launch of Clasiq’s new platform, they were able to see a 127% increase in user traffic to their new auction platform, with auction participation growing exponentially month to month.

The number of users that have requested to list their car for sale has grown by 59% over a 180 day period post-launch.