Suzuki Digital Experience
SUMMARY
Our key objective was to comprehensively grasp the diverse user needs and goals within the vehicle purchasing journey, encompassing both cars and motorcycles.
To facilitate adaptability, we aimed to create a pattern library and establish components that would streamline processes, ensuring efficiency, maintaining consistency, and accelerating our time to market.
Our approach to redesigning the Suzuki Global Website involved a comprehensive immersion into the diverse customer experience across all four product environments, encompassing both online interactions and physical retail contexts.
We initiated the process by crafting a robust Proof of Concept (PoC) for each product division. This PoC served as a foundational tool to foster stakeholder alignment and secure buy-in, ensuring a shared vision among all involved parties.
Throughout the project, we took ownership of the digital delivery of the enhanced experience, spearheading the implementation of the technical solutions we meticulously defined. This hands-on approach enabled us to ensure a seamless and cohesive online platform aligned with the desired user experience and business objectives.
Approach
Establishing a strategic proposition
Suzuki's online presence had evolved organically over an extended period, leading to a fragmented array of digital interfaces that fell short in aligning with customer purchasing habits and decision-making processes. It was evident that a mere surface-level facelift would not suffice to address the underlying issues.
Collaborating closely with Suzuki, our primary objective was to establish a clear strategic direction for their digital sales journeys. This served as the cornerstone for all subsequent design initiatives. Our focus revolved around the imperative need to seamlessly unify the customer experience across various digital touchpoints, thereby ensuring a smooth transition to the real-world dealership encounters, all aimed at creating a harmonious and integrated journey for the customers."
Utilizing a diverse range of user research methodologies, our team engaged with Suzuki customers, dealers, and internal staff to comprehensively understand their needs and preferences. This approach enabled us to pinpoint essential features crucial for aiding customers in comprehending their options and empowering them to make informed, confident purchase decisions.
The research process meticulously identified distinct needs across various segments of Suzuki's customer base. For instance, we discerned the significance of rich visuals and 360º viewability for motorcycle buyers compared to the specific informational requirements and the comparative sizing preferences of potential car buyers.
Insights gleaned from users played a pivotal role in swiftly defining the design direction. This early understanding was translated into a Proof of Concept, allowing us to validate our design hypotheses before making significant investments in development. This approach facilitated the gathering of invaluable feedback from both business stakeholders and target customers, ensuring that our design thinking was refined and aligned with the actual user needs and business objectives.
The Research
Leveraging comprehensive customer research, our team rapidly transitioned from proof of concept to a robust product design strategy for the Suzuki Global Website. This involved a multifaceted approach:
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Informed Design Strategy: We utilized customer insights to craft a thoroughly validated set of features and requirements, ensuring our design decisions were rooted in the needs and preferences of Suzuki's user base.
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Iterative Prototyping: Our process involved the creation of wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes to undergo rigorous user testing. This iterative approach allowed us to refine the user interface and experience, prioritizing usability and intuitive navigation.
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Brand-Aligned Visual and Interaction Design: While focusing on user-centered principles, we integrated Suzuki's distinctive brand elements into the visual and interaction design. This ensured a consistent and recognizable experience for Suzuki’s audience.
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Scalable Design System: We developed a robust design system with adaptable patterns in code. This not only facilitated efficient design consistency but also allowed for future scalability and adaptability as the website evolves.
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Efficient Implementation: The final phase involved the seamless build and deployment of the redesigned website, consolidating the efforts from design to development into a cohesive and effective digital platform.
This comprehensive redesign process was meticulously crafted to prioritize the user journey, align with Suzuki’s brand identity, and ensure a seamless, scalable, and optimized online experience for Suzuki’s global audience.
High-performance design
Sketching wireframes allowed us to quickly test design solutions to customer problems. We noticed that distinguishing how big a vehicle is in relation to another vehicle was an important early factor in understanding the Suzuki range. These kinds of differentiating insights across user groups occurred throughout our design research process and fed into our visual design direction for each product line.
Wireframes
Component System Approach
We took a component-based approach to designing and developing these digital experiences. We created 6 basic styles of pages consolidating Suzuki’s current offering by 75%.
The benefit of this approach became clear when assessing the technical feasibility of the project. Our designs were to be deployed to a shared CMS, which accentuated the need for shared templates and modules, as well as defining consistent patterns to be used and reapplied across the brands.
Throughout the rest of the design and development work, we took a 70/30 approach to reusing components for Motorcycles from Cars. This flexibility allows Suzuki to respond to sector-specific user needs whilst maintaining brand consistency and the efficiency of the design system we defined. During the project, each decision to flex the core patterns was based on user requirements which we uncovered during research.
