Two apps, one login.
Turning a payment portal into a relationship.
My role
Contributions: SSO design direction, cross-functional alignment with product, engineering, and third-party vendor, UX design for seamless authentication flow
The ask
As the largest auto dealership network in the nation, Lithia is huge: dealerships, service centers, driveway.com, Driveway Finance, and more. My Driveway was introduced as the central hub, where customers gain access to features that could deepen their relationship with Lithia: service scheduling, extended warranty purchases, vehicle management.
Driveway Finance had 60k users signing in every month to their payment app. This felt like a no brainer. Route all those users through My Driveway and increase customer loyalty.
😫 an iFrame!
The simplest solution was to pull the Driveway Finance payment portal into My Driveway via iFrame. It worked, but it came with problems to solve:
Unreliable sizing across viewport widths
Layered scrolling conflicts on mobile
Responsive behavior inside a contained frame
Two authentication processes
What we needed was seamless SSO
Asking users to manage two separate logins was a non-starter. We needed single sign-on that could handle account creation, loan lookup, and background account linking in sequence.
It took three calls between myself, the Product Manager, the Architect, and the 3rd party vendor to land the solution, but we did it. I pushed for the lowest possible lift to the user and the complexity stayed in the background.
What about the app?
Driveway Finance customers had their own native app, myDFC, and they weren't going to stop using it because the backend changed. We needed to pipe them through My Driveway without delivering the entire My Driveway experience inside the app.
Ever turn a mirror on itself?
With the app, we had this native wrapper + iFrame inception situation. So I started talking with engineering to see what we could do to smooth out the experience.
Using JavaScript, we suppressed the full My Driveway interface inside the app wrapper and surfaced only the payment portal. App users got exactly what they came for, inside the app they already had, with no indication that anything underneath had changed.
All Driveway Finance users successfully migrated in just two months.
What shipped
A unified authentication and payment experience connecting two products.
Driveway Finance customers could create a My Driveway account, find their loan, and get to their payment portal in one continuous flow. Existing My Driveway customers could connect their Driveway Finance account in a few additional steps. App users saw no disruption at all.
Getting those 60k monthly users to actually engage with the broader My Driveway ecosystem was always the longer play. This project built the on-ramp.