Iteration Over Reinvention: Improving Our Product Cards
The temptation to redesign everything
I think every designer has felt the temptation. You’re given a brief involving an existing experience and your first instinct is to completely rethink it.
Sometimes that’s because redesigning something from scratch is genuinely exciting. Other times it’s because you want to leave your mark on a product and bring your own ideas to something that already exists.
And often, that’s the right approach.
A fresh perspective can be incredibly valuable, especially when a design has been around for a long time. New eyes can spot opportunities and challenge assumptions that have become deeply embedded over months or even years. When you’ve been close to a design for too long, it can be difficult to see beyond the decisions that have already been made.
But for high-traffic, heavily used experiences, a complete redesign can introduce unnecessary risk. Sometimes the most effective approach is not reinvention, but refinement. Small, deliberate improvements can enhance an experience that’s already performing well, without sacrificing the familiarity and usability that users have grown accustomed to.
It’s easy to underestimate how much impact a series of small optimisations can have. Individually they may seem minor, but together they can completely transform how a design feels and performs.
What was already working
Our product cards, or vehicle cards as we call them at Arnold Clark, had been live in their existing form for several years, so it felt like a good time to revisit them.
What’s interesting is that we weren’t responding to a major problem. We had no significant user complaints, no glaring usability issues, and no evidence that the cards were underperforming. By most measures, they were doing exactly what they were designed to do.
That, however, doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for improvement.
Good design isn’t simply about solving problems. It’s also about spotting opportunities. Even successful interfaces can be refined, and as design systems evolve it’s natural to identify small inconsistencies or areas where visual hierarchy could work harder.
The changes I made
When I started looking at the cards, I used a technique a colleague once taught me.
If you lean back slightly from your screen and allow your eyes to unfocus just a little, you stop seeing individual UI elements and start seeing visual weight instead. It’s a useful way to assess hierarchy because it quickly reveals which elements are attracting attention and whether that’s where the user’s focus should be.
The first thing that stood out to me was the branch information at the bottom of the card.
The branch icon and name felt surprisingly prominent, competing with elements that should have much higher priority, such as the vehicle name and price. For someone quickly scanning a list of vehicles, this didn’t feel right.
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The fix was simple. I reduced the font weight slightly and replaced the dark grey text colour with a slightly softer grey from our palette that still met accessibility requirements. The information remained visible, but it no longer dominated the card.
At the same time, I reinforced the hierarchy of the vehicle title by increasing its size slightly. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but enough to strengthen its role as the primary anchor point when scanning results.
Another improvement involved the horizontal dividers throughout the card.
Previously, these stretched to the full width of the card. To me, this unintentionally suggested that each section below the divider was a completely separate piece of content. It also interrupted the natural eye movement down the left-hand side of the card.
By pulling the dividers in line with the card content, the information felt more connected and easier to scan.
My attention then shifted to the feature chips beneath the vehicles make and model heading.
In the existing design, these labels were displayed in uppercase. While they were attention-grabbing, they weren’t particularly easy to read at speed. Switching them to sentence case improved their readability and made them feel more natural within the overall layout.
Finally, I made a number of smaller visual refinements. These were less about usability and more about bringing the cards into alignment with the rest of our design system.
A little more padding gave the content room to breathe. Rounded corners helped the cards feel more modern. A subtle shadow improved contrast against the page background and provided better visual separation between cards.
None of these changes were significant on their own. In isolation, they’re the kind of tweaks that might easily be overlooked.
Together, however, they created a card that felt cleaner, calmer, and easier to scan, all without changing the experience users were already familiar with.
The lesson
This project reinforced something I think we can all overlook.
Not every design challenge requires a complete redesign.
In this case, the opportunity wasn’t to build something entirely new. It was to understand what was already working, identify a few areas that could work better, and make thoughtful improvements that enhanced the experience without changing it beyond recognition.
Looking back, none of the individual updates were particularly dramatic. Most users probably wouldn’t be able to point to a single change and explain why the cards feel better. But that’s often the nature of iterative design. The value comes from the cumulative effect of lots of small decisions working together.
