Volkswagen Model Bucket Page

Digital Product Design and Strategy
2015-2016

Challenge

In the summer of 2015, we made a proposal to our Volkswagen clients: VW.com was beginning to fall behind the industry, and the most important pages were not working to their fullest potential. Competitive brands used people, photography, and video to sell a lifestyle. Most images on VW.com were computer generated, interactive and video content was next to non-existent, and important information was frequently hidden within carousels to save space. We knew that we needed to bring the Volkswagen brand to life in a way that would help shoppers picture themselves in a VW. And the most highly visited pages were a natural place for Volkswagens to come to life: the Model Bucket Pages.

Our clients agreed that the Model Bucket Pages were in need of some love, but impressed upon us their low appetite for site redesign. In order to maximize the impact of our work, we would need to do more than design a new webpage—we would need to develop an extensible system that could support the evolution of VW.com.

The 3 creative concepts we started with and eventually married into a single system.

System Design

Market research, competitive auditing, stakeholder interviews, and user questionnaires helped us determine the essential components of an automotive model page. From there, we set out to create a flexible system that would allow us to accommodate the current needs of automotive shoppers as well as anticipate future updates. Our system allowed modules to be used for many purposes, and would readily accept new ones for future enhancement.

User Testing

Because the new Model Bucket Page would be the foundation for the evolution of VW.com, it was crucial to validate our hypotheses. We tested our designs at every step, integrating real user feedback on a weekly basis. The team (including our clients) grew to view user testing as an essential part of the process, abandoning many preconceptions in favor of testing-supported data.

Results

Our key sales indicators all improved, and the mobile site leapfrogged its desktop counterpart in engagement.

Evaluation and Optimization

Following the new Model Bucket Page launches, we closely tracked their performance against a number of KPIs. After three months of data collection, trends indicated that our most important indicators (lead submission, builder completion, trade-in estimation, mobile bounce rate) had improved following the redesign.

However, the data also indicated that expensive to maintain lower funnel pages were being obviated by the new, more fully-featured Model Bucket Page. This insight became the foundation of a site re-architecting, allowing us to continue rolling out the system we had developed for the Model Bucket Page across the full suite of VW.com shopping tools.

Role

UX Lead

The Team

Elizabeth Cordingley
Rich Stewart
Brendon Volpe
Able Parris
Zaid Al-Asady
Cory Roth
Melissa Wedeen
Abbey Park
Jun Ikeya
Justice Erolin
Sean Klosky
Neseem Ishaq
James Gud
Hassan Elzein