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Our team partnered with a leading automotive OEM to tackle a common challenge in their digital operations: delivering a seamless, consistent user experience across multiple web applications. The client's siloed organizational structure had led to inconsistencies in design and user flow, resulting in a less-than-optimal user experience.
Our goal was to establish a holistic UX architecture process that aligned with the client's existing SAFe framework, enabling a more efficient and effective pre-planning of user experience before it was handed off to product designers. By developing a process that focused on stakeholder requirements and user insights, we were able to reduce workload and last-minute discussions on design, while also aligning product designers with other teams on core parameters of their tasks.
Our key deliverables included the documentation of micro and overall customer journeys, an analysis of UX and architecture findings, and the development and management of a dedicated UX architecture team. We overcame several challenges during the project, including a lack of understanding of what user experience design is, a silo-based working structure, and resistance from product designers who were afraid of losing their value.
In the end, our partnership resulted in a more consistent and engaging user experience for the client's web platform, enabling them to better meet the demands and expectations of their customers.
Our team was hired by the marketing and sales organization of an automotive OEM to improve the user experience of customers browsing the web platform, including the market website, online shops for all assortments, and other web applications like the car configurator. The goal of the project was to establish a cohesive information architecture and coordinated executive team that would provide users with a more consistent and user-focused browsing experience.
When we started the project, the organization of our client was in the process of transforming to the SAFe framework, which included a holistic planning process for all teams. However, user experience planning still needed to be reflected in this process. Our task was to adapt the SAFe organizational framework to cover these aspects and ensure that the user experience (and information architecture in particular) was integrated into the overall planning process.
We identified a siloed product design approach at the start of the project, which was not coordinated among teams. Each team was given specific tasks without considering the overall user journey, leading to redundant work and diverse solutions for the same user tasks on both the conceptual and visual levels. This siloed approach was apparent to users, who could experience where the responsibilities of one development team started and the next team's responsibility began.
Additionally, there was no overall process to allocate stakeholder requirements, such as demands from the markets, management, strategy, vision, data, and customer insights teams, to the platform from a UX perspective. This lack of a holistic process resulted in inefficiencies, as each product team had to analyze the same requirements individually, without any conceptual pre-screening or briefing. This led to redundant work and diverse solutions for the same user tasks on a conceptual and visual level, as well as a disjointed user journey experience, which could be frustrating for users browsing the platform.