Brief

How does one demonstrate the value of design to an organization that is still in the process of developing their UX maturity?

GM at the time sat between levels 1 & 2 on the Nielsen Norman UX maturity scale. To help with this transition, I showed how we could take a closer look our Dealership websites from a customer centric lens. We asked the question: How could we improve this project by creatively utilizing existing technologies, as well as influence improvement for the adjacent points in GM’s shopping journey?

Given the audience , I scaled back the message about users & customers, but emphasized how an autonomous website can successfully reduce agency costs.

Contribution:
• Set a vision for a struggling product
• Demonstrate the difference between UX and production art
• Change the dynamics of the conversation within IT
• Change the engagement between IT & Business

Lessons:
• No matter the complexity, summarize the pitch to <5min
• The importance of enthusiasm from other functions can’t be overstated

Problem

While the stakeholders felt that the problems of this product had to do with the design of the Dealership website, my concern was around the fragmentation of the customer shopping journey. The business structure of OEM to franchise entities had forced a deep divide between the learn, shop, and own environments.

Opportunity

If the separated dots of a shopping journey can be linked, a shopping and ownership journey can be linked to create a circle. This circle represents the customer life-cycle, which is in line with GM’s company vision of creating Customers for Life.

Solution - Making a Smarter Website

A smart website will prioritize pre-configured widgets that are most relevant to the a customer based on their browsing history, or analyzed trends of a larger website visitor base. A set-and-forget system will require minimal administrative intervention from content managers. A very important point for the franchise stakeholders.

A modular approach allows the system to collect behavioral data, and prioritize content automatically. A concept that resonated most with the development team, is that if we can encapsulate functionality in a widget effectively, pages in a website will become obsolete.

To illustrate the benefits of this approach, I started by creating 3 very different personas to describe their very different needs and intentions.

The set up was followed by a demonstration on how landing on a Dealership website can serve a very different experience catered to the needs of the visitor.

Learn Customer

Content catered to a shopper that has no car shopping history in their browser.
The prioritized widgets are focused on educating customers about vehicle categories and their prices in order to carefully guide them through the shopping journey.

Impact

The enthusiasm from the development team helped with this deck becoming the unofficial long term goal. Since this presentation, there was a noticeable difference in how design was considered during road mapping conversations.