Hagerty Auctions Photo Management
The goal: scale the product by increasing operational efficiency
The operations team is crucial to Marketplace Auctions, handling tasks from reserve negotiating, curating listings, to scoping out inventory and managing photos. Managing photos, particularly, was very time-consuming with the previous processes and softwares. We needed to improve their workflow so they could focus on more valuable tasks, and help auction inventory scale more efficiently.
Additionally, this is a key piece in building feature-depth where the processes for receiving and managing photos will be consolidated and live natively within the product, eliminating the dependence on multiple softwares. This feature is crucial in helping the product scale through technical improvements.
Frictions in previous processes and softwares
Consignors previously submitted auction photos through Sharepoint, a third party file management tool not ideal for customer-facing use.
Key Sharepoint frictions:
Confusing, frustrating, and time consuming for consignors
Disconnected from internal auctions admin software
Operations then used the content management software, Contentful, which was not meant for batch managing the large volume of images needed for auctions.
Key Contentful frictions:
20 file upload limit
No multi-select capability
Requires tagging photos to assign to a specific vehicle
Only individual images can be reordered at one time
Because of this, the photo management process was cumbersome and a significant bottleneck in building auction inventory.
Essential functions
Essential functions were incorporated to get the photo management software on par with typical file management tools. This included features such as multi-select, download, delete, and moving files between locations.
Unique auctions functions
I incorporated aspects specific to our auctions process including:
A 2-folder system that delineates approved and not approved photos for one specific auction.
Reordering functionality for single and multiple images at once.
Different ways to perform the same task since multiple team members work on any given auction, and everyone works differently.
Multiple methods for varying workflows
Menu functions for approve, remove, download, and delete surface throughout the UX so users can perform the same tasks at multiple touchpoints and in varying ways.
Main menu
Card level menu
Media lightbox gallery menu
Internal testing
To validate design solutions, we conducted internal user acceptance testing with our operations team. Early test results indicate a 70% reduction in processing time for auction photos.
Expected outcomes
By optimizing the workflow in managing photos, our operations team can process auctions faster, ultimately publishing more auction listings which generates more revenue.
