ABSTRACT
A friend recently shopping for a car was delighted to realize that much of her shopping, if not the final purchase, could be taken care of online, free of the long waits or pushy sales representatives she feared would find when visiting dealers’ lots. However, once she began her shopping, she quickly realized that few, if any, of the manufacturer or dealer websites supported the tasks she envisioned carrying out. She was often forced to complete a multistep customization process involving choices among options packages, hubcap styles, and interior preferences before she was able to view even a basic price for a particular model. In some cases, she was required to enter personal information or set up an account by completing tedious forms in order to retrieve relevant pricing information. Unhappy with what she saw as artificial barriers to information she required to make her purchase (which, she admits, she would likely have conducted online), my friend began to resent the companies whose sites she felt wasted her time. If this is how I’m treated in the privacy of my own home, she wondered, what should I expect if I were to walk on to the lot? In frustration, my friend opted to contact her bank for help and ended up completing the majority of her shopping through the bank’s website (and eventually chose the bank for financing). Her interactions with the actual dealer were brief and left her with the impression that they were happy to waste her time. In effect, the usability problems on the manufacturer and dealer websites strengthened her preexisting aversion to their services when the sites were likely intended and supposedly designed to do just the opposite. They also cost a dealership a financing customer and led to negative feedback from my friend in a number of online car-shopping forums.
