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Vehicle Discovery on Toyota.com - PLP, Filters, & Product Cards

Overview
Toyota.com is one of the highest-traffic consumer sites in the US, supporting millions of users exploring vehicles across a broad and complex catalog. As the platform evolved, the vehicle listing experience wasn't keeping pace with how people actually shop.

This project focused on rethinking how users browse, filter, and compare vehicles, and building patterns scalable enough to grow with the platform.

The Challenge
Vehicle shopping is a high-consideration journey. People compare models, trims, and features across multiple sessions before making a decision. The existing experience was creating friction at almost every step of that process.

Filtering was rigid and hard to navigate. Vehicle cards were inconsistent depending on where they appeared. Content hierarchy made side-by-side comparison harder than it needed to be. And the underlying patterns were becoming increasingly difficult for teams to maintain and extend.

The work also needed to serve two goals at once — helping customers make better decisions while supporting dealer lead generation through Toyota's distributed retail network.

filters selected indicator
We started by rethinking filtering from the ground up. The previous approach buried options and required too many steps to narrow results meaningfully. We redesigned the filter system to reduce friction, improve clarity, and let users get to the right vehicles faster.

High-value filters like trim and color were surfaced as individual selections rather than buried inside a collapsed panel. This reduced the number of steps between intent and result for the most common filtering behaviors.

all filters open
The full filter panel was redesigned to feel organized rather than overwhelming, with a clearer hierarchy between filter categories and individual options.

all filters expanded

individual high-value filters - trim
Trim and color were the two filters users reached for most. We gave them dedicated treatment, more visual, more scannable, and faster to interact with than a standard dropdown or checkbox list.

individual high-value filters - color

Product Thinking
This wasn't a one-time redesign. Toyota.com functions as an evolving product surface, so everything we built needed to support ongoing iteration and experimentation rather than lock the experience into a fixed state.

That meant working closely with product, engineering, and marketing throughout — aligning on priorities, pressure-testing assumptions against real user behavior, and making sure the patterns we created could adapt to future vehicle launches, campaigns, and business needs without starting from scratch every time.

The hardest decisions weren't design decisions. They were about where to draw the line between what users need in the moment and what the business needs over time. Getting those two things to point in the same direction is most of the work.

Impact
• Improved clarity and consistency across vehicle discovery experiences
• Reduced friction in filtering and comparison flows
• Created reusable patterns that scaled more efficiently across teams
• Strengthened pathways between online exploration and dealer acquisition flows
• Established a more flexible foundation for future iteration and experimentation

Note: this work has completed user testing and has been handed off to engineering for implementation.