Quick Rego lookup – Reducing search friction and driving adoption

Context

Dealers use AutoGate daily to look up vehicles by registration and VIN as part of their acquisition workflow. This flow contributes roughly $2M per year in pay-per-use revenue and handles close to 100K searches per month, so even small improvements have meaningful financial impact.

Problem

  • The main rego/VIN search was buried in a longer acquisition workflow and could take up to 7 clicks over 4 different screens to access.

  • The product team believed that if we could shorten the path to search, we could both speed up decisions and grow total search volume.

Hypothesis

Can we reduce the flow to less clicks and increase adoption without hurting existing behaviours?

My role

I owned the full product design process from discovery through rollout, collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams as well as the Marketing team for GTM activities.

  • Led discovery, mapping the existing rego search journey and synthesising dealer pain points.

  • Created low‑ and high‑fidelity prototypes of the Quick Rego modal and navigation variants.

  • Partnered with PM and Data to define experiment hypotheses, success metrics, and guardrails.

  • Collaborated with engineering on implementation details to minimise performance overhead.

  • Analysed experiment results with the product team and translated insights into the final design.

Experimentation

To validate placement and behaviour, we ran two UI experiments via Optimizely.

Variant A – Hidden under a menu

Hypothesis: If we place “Quick Rego” as a secondary option inside the “Add opportunity” dropdown, power users will find it without cluttering the main interface.

Variant B – Prominent, side‑by‑side placement

Hypothesis: If we surface “Quick Rego” as a first‑class action next to “Add Opportunity”, more dealers will discover and adopt the faster flow.

Solution

The shipped Quick Rego feature delivered:

  • A 3‑click path: click “Rego” → search and submit.

  • A clear path to deeper options for complex cases.

From a visual standpoint, the flow:

  • Reused existing component patterns, keeping implementation cost low.

  • Introduced a small ⚡ icon to signal speed, without breaking AutoGate’s design language.

Outcomes

  • Up to +6% uplift in Quick Rego flow utilisation after surfacing it as a primary action. Sustained search volume on a feature worth circa $2M per year and handling ~100k searches per month.

  • Search completion in around 3 seconds for experienced users.

  • No adverse impact on related opportunity metrics.

Key learnings

  • Small, focused UX changes in high‑value flows can yield impactful returns, particularly when discoverability and speed are tightly optimised.

  • Experiment with placement: just building the feature was not enough; the move from buried menu to first‑class action is what unlocked adoption.