Mazda USA
About The Project
An automotive manufacturer looking to elevate their brand perception to match a new more premium product.
Role: Senior UX Lead
Employed by: Mirum Agency
Challenge
Mazda was on the verge of a shift in their product design toward more premium design and materials. The previous website was a homegrown solution with no CMS capabilities making it difficult to keep up with content updates and enhancements. The automotive industry is unique in the role a website plays in the modern shopping journey and Mazda needed an experience that put the customer first.
User Journey
Through our learnings we discovered how shoppers utilized automotive websites throughout their shopping journey and specifically how Mazda shoppers used the site. Mazda has been around for a long time but the average person we surveyed didn't know what was in Mazda's lineup or really what they stood for as a brand. We needed a way to better integrate the brand story into the transactional content that was traditionally on the web.
Platform Refresh
First off a new CMS was needed. In addition to better improving content management workflows the development of a component library was introduced to speed up creation of new content while still a keeping consistent look and feel. The introduction of a new platform meant a lot of ground work had to be done in order to support design changes that were coming.
Measurement
In our research we found that shopper's goals were quite different throughout different phases of the journey and that the duration of that journey forced us to look at success metrics outside the normal conversion funnel. Instead we looked at crafting interactions around consumer segments and measured success based on servicing the mindset of the consumer segment at that point in their journey.
Build & Price
General content pages were easily translated into a responsive framework but more complex tools like the vehicle configurator were more of a challenge. Our research showed that more users were interested in being able to build a vehicle on their mobile and tablet devices than in previous years, so we had to come up with an answer. Initial designs were much more ambitious in terms of animations and additional tool integrations which I hope to see rolled out in additional phases.
