Buying a car is a major decision, and it can be even more overwhelming when you're new to the country. For many Chinese newcomers in Canada, challenges like language barriers, unfamiliar vehicle specs, and a lack of trusted resources often make the process more difficult than it needs to be.
Righto App set out to make car ownership in Canada easier for Chinese-speaking consumers by creating a platform to help research, build community and provide ratings for vehicle-related services.
As one of two designers, I co-led the design effort from the ground up. With limited resources, I focused on research-backed decisions and user-centric thinking to shape the user experience and help bring the product from 0 to 1.
Automotive news and forums are often scattered and mostly in english.
Concerns about being overcharged in buying a car or when getting repairs.
Confusion around the process itself. For example, not knowing they needed insurance in place before picking up the vehicle.
Users became part of our community
Local businesses brought onboard as service partners
It not only removes language barriers by presenting information in Chinese, but also streamlines the research process by allowing users to compare models across different brands.
Whether the users are new to cars or enthusiasts, our social features help them find others with similar needs and interests. We hope this creates a supportive and welcoming environment that makes users want to stick around.
From choosing the payment options to understanding insurance, this guide walks users through the entire process.
Each partner is prescreened by our team and paired with a user feedback system to make car maintenance and repairs more transparent.
To better understand our target audience, we started by surveying a small group of Chinese-speaking users in Canada about their car-buying habits, pain points and digital behaviours.
In addition to the survey, I also took the initiative to research and study datasets relevant to our product, such as car ownership rates by age group in Canada, the ratio of Chinese newcomers in Ontario, and user demographics on Chinese social platforms.
Some of the findings aligned with our survey result. Other insights, like the limited size of our addressable market, gave me things to think about later when reflecting on the product’s potential.
While Western minimalism offers a cleaner, less overwhelming experience, we recognized that many of our target users were recent immigrants or international students who might feel more comfortable with Chinese-style UI patterns.
We decided to find a middle ground: a Chinese-style layout with minimalist icons and a simplified color palette. This gave us a culturally familiar approach without over-cluttering the interface visually. We planned to validate this direction through user feedback after launch.
Midway through the project, we set a new goal: supporting car purchases directly on the platform. But after assessing our resources, we realized this wasn't feasible for the soft launch.
Instead, we proposed a more doable plan: partnering with local dealerships and embedding their listings into our platform for the official launch. Users could browse through photos and videos, then reach out to the dealership directly to buy. This approach gave us a monetization path through partnerships while leaving room for future feature expansion.
Looking back, we could’ve benefited from narrowing the scope. There were a lot of features we wanted to offer, but trying to deliver everything at once stretched our resources thin and delayed the timeline for gathering user feedback. Instead, a phased release could have allowed us to deliver sooner and learn more effectively. Even launching partially built experiences would have helped us validate direction and iterate with real user input.
Another thing I would’ve done differently is addressing our lack of backend tracking sooner. It wasn’t until later that I realized our system wasn’t set up to collect some of the crucial data points that could improve the experience. While user privacy is important, basic behavioural data like which posts were trending, which service partners users interacted with most, or how often certain features were used, was never recorded. This made it hard to understand engagement patterns and build user stickiness. If I could do it again, I would raise this sooner as it could’ve made a big difference for both design iterations and business development.