Brazil's first end to end online car purchasing platform. A project that forced me to think in systems not screens and led me to understand UX as orchestration between service layers, APIs, and human moments that couldn't be automated.
When FIAT came to us, the brief sounded deceptively simple: build Brazil's first digital car buying platform. But within the first week of discovery, it became clear this wasn't a UI problem. It was a service infrastructure problem wearing a digital interface.
The challenge wasn't designing screens. It was orchestrating a system where API architecture, dealer inventory, financial services, logistics, and customer emotion had to work in concert and any failure in any layer would fracture the experience entirely.
What made this genuinely hard was the gap between what customers believed was happening and what was actually happening behind the scenes. The old flow was a lead generation machine: you'd express interest on FIAT's website, and weeks later a dealer would call you. My FIAT needed to collapse that distance to zero from intent to delivery, fully trackable, fully digital.
"The interface would only work if the service worked. Every screen was a contract with a backend process that had to exist."
Before touching a single wireframe, I needed to understand the invisible architecture. I conducted a series of structured interviews with the Senior Planner to establish target audience parameters, and separate sessions with API engineers and technology executives to reverse engineer the system's constraints and capabilities.
This research wasn't about validating assumptions it was about discovering what was even possible. The API infrastructure would define the interaction model. If inventory couldn't be surfaced in real time, real time selection was off the table. If financing wasn't integrated, the flow would break at the most critical moment.
Working in close partnership with the planning team, we mapped the end to end consumer journey across the entire purchase lifecycle from the first moment of consideration to the first week of ownership. This wasn't a UX exercise in a silo. I brought planners, copywriters, and design directors into a shared room and made the journey visible together.
My competitive research was deliberately international. The Brazilian market had no direct precedent to learn from, so I looked at every market where digital car sales had been attempted identifying navigation patterns, trust signals, and decision point architecture that worked regardless of cultural context.
The key pattern: in every successful market, the configurator (model → color → optionals) was a confidence building ritual, not a funnel. The best experiences treated customization as belonging, not just selection.
Before a single pixel was placed, I facilitated a cross functional design workshop. The room: copywriters, planners, design directors, UX designers. The setup: left wall = purchase journey. Right wall = four pillars: Features, Expectations, Needs, and Communication.
Each person was asked one question: "What matters to you most when buying a car?" then we categorized, clustered, and synthesized. The output wasn't a deliverable. It was a shared mental model that the entire team could reference for the duration of the project.
This is the moment I now recognize as the most strategically important decision of the project: investing in alignment before investing in design. Every downstream decision moved faster because this foundation existed.
Sketches came after the workshop not before. I used paper deliberately to move fast and stay conceptual. At this stage, the questions were about sequencing and system logic, not visual design. What should the customer see first? What decision do they need to make next? What information is required at each step and where does it come from?
During the wireframing phase, one realization changed the direction of the project: we weren't designing a purchasing flow we were designing a purchasing ecosystem.
The configurator, the financing calculator, the inventory layer, the order tracker, the delivery scheduler these weren't separate screens. They were interconnected states of a single system. Designing them independently would produce friction at every handoff.
At this stage of the project, my role shifted from creator to guardian. The Art Director was responsible for the visual execution. My responsibility was to ensure that every visual decision honored the UX principles established in the earlier phases: clear hierarchy, accessible contrast, progressive disclosure, and emotional tone calibrated to a high consideration purchase.
This is a role distinction I've come to think is critical at scale: the responsibility at this level is not to design every screen, but to build the conditions where every screen gets designed well. I communicated through annotated specs, accessibility requirements, and regular reviews, not by taking over the artboard.
The final design achieved the primary goal: making a complex, multi stage transaction feel as simple as a considered decision should feel. Not frictionless but navigable. Not minimal but clear.
I worked on My FIAT in a Senior UX role focused on experience architecture early enough in my career that the lessons were still arriving in real time. Looking back, I can name what this project was actually about: designing with and through people, not despite organizational complexity.
The instinct in complex projects is to retreat to craft. To protect quality by doing it yourself. My FIAT showed me that the harder and more important skill is creating the conditions for quality to emerge from a room full of different expertise and that a workshop with the right structure is worth more than a hundred hours at the artboard alone.