<aside> 🚗
| Role | Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Miroma group agency - Motorway |
| Focus | Marketplace operations, mobile workflow design, vehicle inspection, logistics, data quality, dealer trust |
| Contribution | Product strategy, user research, product design |
| Team | 1 product manager, 1 product designer, 3 engineers |
| Year | 2021 |
| </aside> |
Motorway is a UK vehicle marketplace connecting sellers, dealers and the operational teams that move vehicles through the transaction journey.
A key part of that journey was vehicle collection and inspection. Third-party drivers collected vehicles from sellers and delivered them to dealers, but the inspection process was manual, slow and difficult for Motorway to observe. Inspections could take up to two hours, and inconsistent reporting created uncertainty for dealers, operations teams and the wider business.
The Driver Inspection App was created to digitise and standardise this process. The goal was to help drivers complete inspections more quickly and accurately, give Motorway better operational visibility, and improve trust between sellers, drivers and dealers.
This was not a clean desk-based mobile app problem. It was a field workflow problem: outdoor conditions, time pressure, inconsistent vehicle data, third-party drivers, limited bandwidth and real operational consequences when information was missed.
Motorway had limited visibility and control over a critical part of the marketplace experience: the moment a vehicle moved from seller to dealer.
Because inspections were managed through third-party delivery companies, information was fragmented. Dealers did not always receive consistent evidence about vehicle condition, Motorway could not easily measure process quality, and operations teams lacked reliable data for planning, cost management and dispute reduction.
| Business risk | Product symptom | Design opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Low process visibility | Motorway could not reliably see what happened during collection and inspection | Create a structured digital workflow with consistent data capture |
| Dealer trust issues | Vehicle condition information was incomplete or inconsistent | Improve inspection evidence and reporting clarity |
| High operational cost | Inspections could take up to two hours | Reduce inspection time through focused mobile task design |
| Data quality problems | CRM data included inconsistent free text and missing details | Confirm existing data while collecting structured missing information |
| Disjointed communication | Drivers, dealers and internal teams did not share a single source of truth | Create a clearer handoff from collection to delivery |
The strategic shift was to treat inspection as a marketplace trust problem, not only an operational checklist.
The inspection journey needed to work for drivers in real conditions while producing data that Motorway, dealers and operations teams could trust.
That meant balancing speed, accuracy and structure. If the flow was too rigid, drivers would struggle in edge cases. If it was too loose, the business would continue receiving inconsistent data. If it asked for too much, inspections would remain slow.
| Product tension | What made it difficult | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Drivers needed speed | Inspection already took too long and happened under real-world pressure | Design one focused action per screen and reduce cognitive load |
| Dealers needed confidence | Damage, condition and vehicle details had to be captured consistently | Standardise evidence capture and summary submission |
| Motorway needed visibility | The existing third-party process did not produce reliable operational data | Turn inspection into a measurable digital workflow |
| System architecture limited the ideal flow | Panel-by-panel inspection was not feasible, so the team had to use side-by-side inspection | Design around the constraint rather than forcing an impossible model |
| Field conditions were unpredictable | Drivers worked outdoors, sometimes with low signal, glare or time pressure | Use large tap zones, concise content and resilient mobile patterns |