Volkswagen
“What is the end-to-end future journey of a VW costumer? ”
CLIENT/AGENCY - Volkswagen Canada - DDB
MY ROLE - Provide creative leadership and vision for Volkswagen Canada. End-to-end user journey, user testing & website UX/UI
TEAM - Myself, 2 UX designers, and a junior UI designer
Research & Ideation
I was tasked to Provide creative leadership and vision for Volkswagen Canada. One of the initial problems that we came across in the beginning was lack of data on touch-points other than the website.
I started by engineering a process that includes all the touch-points that the user has with our brand. This way we could surface costumer pain points throughout their journey, prioritize their needs, and create measurable value.
Process
Preparatory Research - Digging deeper into the client’s perspective of what the research problem is, their context, perceptions, internal conflicts, or interplays that may emerge during the project. Also gathering all the existing data.
Secondary Research - Qualitative and quantitative, market research, trend analyses, customer data, and any kind of data available within the organization.
User Research - Online ethnography, participant & non-participant observation (dealerships), contextual interviews, in-depth interviews, and focus groups.
Personas - grouping people with shared interests, common behavior patterns, or demographic and geographical similarities.
Journey maps - Visualizing existing experiences (current-state journey) and new experiences that are planned but don’t yet exist (future-state journey maps).
System maps - Visualizing the ecosystem around the service, physical, and digital products. Including stakeholder maps, business blueprint, and ecosystem maps.
Brainstorming - Used to find a starting points for the project, to get to grips with the theme as a group, and to widen the number of alternatives.
Prototyping - Low-fidelity method to prototype and test physical objects and environments that are part of the service experience.
Wireframing - Schematics of the layout and arrangement of web pages, including navigational structures as well as content elements.
High-fidelity UI - Finalizing the design and sending it to the client for approval.
User Testing
In collaboration with McMaster Digital Transformation Research Centre (MDTRC), we were able to combine traditional and NeuroIS methods to alleviate some of the shortcomings of relying solely on self-reported data that can be subject to inherent biases.
Electroencephalography (EEG) - Measuring brain electrical activity to correlate with a range of discrete perceptual, attentional, cognitive, and affective processes.
Live Facial Expression Analysis - Live facial analysis and emotion assessment.
Physiological Measures - Respiration rate, heart rate, galvanic skin responses and facial electromyography was collected to enrich findings and provide additional insights.
Eye Tracking - Non-intrusive collection or real-time gaze data, including fixation durations, saccades, and pupil dilation.
A/V Monitoring and Recording - Using cameras and audio recorders, we monitored, controlled, and directed the room. The recordings also allowed us to analyze the sessions later in more depth.
VW Website
Pre-Owned flow & design
The objective was to develop a simpler and more responsive design/flow for Volkswagen’s pre-owned pages. We also learned from our user testing that our users don’t know much about the benefits of a certified preowned car, so we had to educate them in the journey.
Electric Concepts
The design had to use the Volkswagen branding, website header, footer and navigation, so with that in mind, a scrolling page worked best for the UI structure within the main website.
With some key assets such as the promotional video and hero image provided, we drew up sketches for the desktop UI concepts, adapted to display best on mobile and produced wireframes.
Total Cost of Ownership
Volkswagen has two problems. One, its vehicles are perceived as expensive to purchase, and costly to own, and total cost of ownership is a key barrier to purchase. There’s a perception that VWs are expensive to buy and maintain. This page showcases VW’s intrinsic value and affordability and helps entice more people to consider VW as a viable option.
