Carwow, Leasing Experience Improvements
Partnering with Carwow’s product and brand teams, I audited the leasing journey and designed an educational layer to help first-time lessees decide, with confidence, whether leasing is right for them.
Role Overview
Creative Direction
Product Marketing
Strategy
UX/UI
Understanding the brief
Two products, one very confused customer.
Carwow does two things in leasing, and most customers can’t tell them apart. Carwow Leasing is a neutral marketplace of thousands of deals from every major broker. Carwow Leasey is Carwow’s own broker, sitting inside that marketplace and handling the whole lease end to end. The pages never explained the difference, so a heading like “Carwow Leasey hot deals” meant nothing to someone who’d never heard of Leasey. The brief: make it obvious that you can lease directly with Carwow, and why that’s worth doing.
The Challenge
The Insight
Everyone sells the deal. Nobody answers “should I lease?”
Every leasing site assumes you’ve already decided. Pure comparison sites have no content, pure brokers have no breadth, and every competitor says “trusted” in their headline without ever showing it. Carwow is the only one with guidance, deals and its own broker under one roof, plus a decade of editorial authority. That made the opportunity clear: own the unanswered question, and demonstrate trust rather than claim it. The brand line set the tone: big deals for every budget, big opinions on every car. This is how leasing should feel.
Audit
Every module, under the microscope.
I took apart every module across three pages: the leasing hub, the lease deals grid and stock cars. For each one I asked what job it was doing, which audience it served, whether its label made sense to someone who’d never heard of Leasey, and what it cost us if it didn’t. The test was simple. “Carwow Leasey hot deals” tells a customer nothing. “Lease directly with Carwow” does the job in four words.
Five issues kept surfacing:
Trust signals were missing, or, where present (like “Amazing Deal”), unexplained
No education on how leasing works, or what Leasey is
Little rich content, despite Carwow being a content-led brand
Weak Carwow brand recognition across the flow
Weak Leasey brand recognition
I then mapped solutions from low lift to longer term: an educational layer, trust content, brand alignment and, further out, an AI interview that lets customers speak their needs to a lease finder.
The Game
Is leasing right for you? A quiz with no wrong answers.
For people brand new to leasing, I designed a four-question myth-busting game that sits alongside the funnel rather than inside it. There’s no scoring and no catch. Instead of testing knowledge, each question surfaces a real objection (“not sure it’s actually cheaper”, “worried about the small print”, “don’t want to be tied to a contract”, “just don’t get how it works”) and answers it instantly in plain English. Pick “just don’t get how it works” and you get the simple version: pay monthly, drive a brand new car, hand it back when the term’s up. No selling, no haggling, no faff. The playful start screen, with inflated star shapes and big bold type, makes leasing feel approachable rather than financial.
The Calculator
Brand new car, used car budget..
Many people considering leasing are really comparing it against a used car. So rather than a dry finance tool, I designed a “dream car” calculator built around two sliders: initial deposit and monthly cost. As you drag, a carousel of brand new cars that fit your budget updates in real time, from a Fiat 500 to a Tesla Model Y, each with a Carwow review score and a route straight into deals. It reframes the question from “can I afford this?” to “look what I could be driving”, and leads with the deal, exactly as the positioning asks. An electric variant swaps the sliders for a histogram-style budget picker to speak to EV-curious drivers.
Serves: Considering leasing
The Comparison Tool
Buy vs lease, settled car by car.
For people closer to a decision, I designed a side-by-side cost comparison. Choose a car, trim, term and mileage, and the tool shows what each route actually costs you over the term. In the example, a Peugeot 2008 costs £11,743 to buy after resale versus £8,527 to lease, and the winner gets a trophy. The real design work was in the honesty. Each side lists what’s included, and the small print sits in plain sight: road tax and servicing estimates, maintenance not included, the mileage cap and excess charges. That transparency is the trust signal. A tool that would happily tell you buying is better is one you believe when it says leasing wins.
Serves: Considering and seasoned lessees
Trust
Show it, don’t say it.
The three tools live in an educational layer next to the flow, because you can’t solve leasing literacy inside a deal grid. Inside the flow, the job is smaller and sharper: find the moments where a single line earns trust. On the deal page, the unexplained “Amazing Deal” badge gains a one-line explainer of how Carwow scores price against monthly cost. A “Carwow favourite” module borrows authority from Auto Express and the Carwow Group experts. Longer term, I proposed short-form, social-style video with the team to bring the expertise people already know from the reviews into the leasing journey.
Outcome
From audit to working prototypes..
I presented the audit and proposals as clickable prototypes, so stakeholders could play the quiz, drag the sliders and run a comparison rather than just read about them. Every proposal carried a one-line rationale tied to the positioning and the audience it served. The educational layer was designed as a low-lift addition alongside existing product modules, giving the team a way to test education without reworking the core flow. The work is now moving into build with the product team.