Automotive Site Homepage Redesign

*Company Names redacted*

Summary

I collaborated with product and tech leaders to reimagine the homepage experience of a large automotive website. I worked closely with this team to lead the overall strategic vision of the work while providing more specific guidance and feedback to the design team based on the results from stakeholder and customer interviews, as well as competitor and SWOT analysis. Multiple design options were presented and tested to determine the best-performing changes to be made. Based on post-launch performance numbers, the chosen design generated over 2X the CTR of the original home page.

The Challenge

The company wanted to redesign its home page to emphasize its pivoting business model to be more focused on car sales and reviews while still maintaining ease of access to existing news & blog content for its legacy users.

THE PROCESS

To build trust with the business and its stakeholders and establish our strategic direction, I led the design team through a collaborative design phase based on data metrics provided to us. Our goal was to rapidly reimagine the home page experience in a way that was simple, and relevant.

The Redesign

To further improve conversion on the home page, I worked to optimize the CTA, explored many options, and designed, prototyped, and tested three home page variations. User testing dictated that a more pronounced form, as opposed to a "generic" button CTA and a below-fold layout that remained similar to the existing site, was the clear winner in performance (option 1, below).

THE SOLUTION

Once the winning design was chosen I oversaw the creation of a responsive design system, resulting in a cohesive user experience and efficient design and development processes. Our design system is modern and accessible. It was also flexible enough to have been leveraged as a baseline system for other brands within the company's ecosystem.

Hows & Whys
Each option was tested individually as well as against each other and the existing design. This allowed us to have a solid baseline for performance and a way for us to compare the performance of the different options. The scoring system was based on a user's general page interactions, user preferences, time on the page, as well as company-desired interactions, and a few other key metrics. Based on these performance scores as well as some user feedback during testing, we chose the design to move forward with.

The Result

To determine the efficacy of the revision it was tested in parallel to the existing experience during a multiweek-long A/B test. After the conclusion of the test, it showed that the revised home page had over 2X the CTR in their car shopping experience compared to the original experience.

Due to the performance of these revisions, the company has requested support in the creation and optimization of new and existing revenue channels.