The ultimate car journey
with the Renault-Nissan alliance
When: 2012
Role: UX Associsate director
Team: 12 ux, 12 design and a office or two of developers
As part of thier global alliance Renault and Nissan already share manufacturing plants, the next step was to consolidate thier digital platforms
Helios aims to increase overall lead generation & raise customer satisfaction while at the same time offer huge cost savings in terms of maintenance and running costs
Helios is built on the principle that people buying a car go through the same core steps, no matter where they are in the world.
At the beginning of the project we created an overarching customer journey which identified all touch points a customer has with a brands whilst moving throughout the purchase and ownership journey.
The customer moments map also identified the core moments a customer needs whilst buying a car, as well as identify future customer moments that are begging for innovation. The core moments were then used to inform the prioritise development or our first release (Minimum Viable Product)
To help communicate the vison of the Helios platform, we created a set of customer experience principles and a working prototype.
Although the project was labeled as agile, as the number of developers grew we had to adapt to a water-gile process. This process allowed the development teams to work in build sprints, with enough detail, even when they were based on the other sides of the globe. This process mixes product planning, traditional experience design, and agile development scrums.
After it has been decided what features are going live in a give release we would start to tackle the experience a journey at a time i.e.
As a prospective customer...I want to find a vehicle and find out if it is right for me
To kick off each journey we would have a definition workshop with the alliance product owners. We would discuss business requirements and customer needs, before having a collaborative sketching session where each produt owner would sketch out their ideal page.
These would then be developed as more detailed scamp, or for simple pages move straight into design, using one of the brands as a template to sign off the experience
This is then refined, across the entire journey, and rolled out to the brand on the platform
A detailed online specification is then written to support developers, which list everything about the feature, such as business rules, interactions, seo requirements.
Prototypes we one of the main ways to communicate the vision, to developers and the alliance stakeholders. We also created prototype for isight from user testing
Once each major user journey was designed, we would create a mobile and / or desktop prototype showing how the site should behave. These prototypes would be used alongside detailed functional specification, allowing developers to see the journey in context.
We ran user testing across all major parts of the site. We create multi language prototype for the alliances key markets, including English, French, Chinese and Braziian
As Helios was an being developed in an agile manner, one of the questions we were often asked is what is coming when. To help communicate how the helios platform grows over time we creates an interactive prototype that allows the user to switch between points in time to see how functionality is added to the paltform
The pre sales stream focused on vehicle information & specifications, offers and campaign activity
The Configuration stream is focused on creating one of the most advanced configurrators built to date, with the ultimate goal to allow you to purchase your car onlne
The dealer stream is focusing on functionality lined to the dealership, such as test drive bookings, vehicle inventory listing, and dealer information pages
The owner services stream focuses on serving owners with personalised, relevant content to make servicing their vehicle as easy as possible
The programme started developing 3 of the 6 brands at once. This meant we had to design everything for all 3 brands at once. This quickly became very inefficient.
Once we had a good style base, we moved towards a lead brand approach. This involved designing one brand in detail, and providing guidance on the other two, we would then sit with the interface developers during the build to make sure the styles are applied appropriately.
When we brought another two brands onto the platform we went even further towards pure in browser. We created a set of key pages to define the brand with sketch, and an accompanied style guide, we then moved over to all styling of new functionality in browser
The Helios platform allow the alliance to utilise the content on the platform for other apps, or simply reuse the toolkit to create other brand sites
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