MERCEDES-BENZ

I worked with Mercedes-Benz for several years across multiple projects and sites including Mercedes-Benz USA, Mercedes-Benz Vans, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, the Mercedes me and My MBFS apps, Freightliner Vans, ExpertUpfitter Portal, Fleet Portal, and smart USA.

Mercedes-Benz Vans

I worked extensively with Mercedes-Benz Vans to develop new features and to redesign existing features across the MBVans.com site. With each screen we designed, we focused carefully on guiding visitors through the sales funnel, ensuring they had relevant next steps provided to them in just the right context along the way—and also ensuring the experience produced well-qualified leads for Mercedes-Benz USA and Mercedes-Benz dealerships.

Early on in our engagement with Vans, we created a new home page with “slot machine” functionality for the web site. This feature allowed visitors a unique way to review homepage content, breaking the mold from the typical carousel. Our updates to this homepage enabled a 700% increase in click-through and user engagement on interior pages; 40% increase in organic homepage visitors reaching a model page; 26% increase in click throughs beneath the homepage carousel.

UX Leadership & Collaboration

I supervised all UX work and collaborated with UX designers and a cross-functional team to develop wireframes for complex, responsive features such as updated homepage, model and trim pages, Build Your Van, upfitting, special offers, Van Finder, and the robust new inventory feature on mbvans.com, as well as many other features. We also worked on the Freightliner Vans site, as well as other projects for Vans, such as the ExpertUpfitter Portal for upfitter professionals and the Mercedes-Benz Fleet portal, which would allow companies with sizable fleets such as Amazon, UPS, and FedEx to purchase large numbers of vans directly online.

Whenever possible, we engaged with vision work across the Mercedes-Benz account. Above, you see sample screens from a much longer storyboard, which showed a small business owner working his way through the purchase funnel to buy his first Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Van, and eventually even building a fleet of Vans for his business, which he could track online via the Fleet Portal. We began this deliverable by brainstorming a more traditional user journey, but then hired an illustrator to make it much more visual and creative for our presentation to the client.

BUILD YOUR VAN

Build Your Own (or BYO) features play an integral role on sites in the automotive vertical. Above, you see a single step in the highly complex Build Your Van experience we developed for Vans, which displays responsively from desktop to mobile.

When we redesigned this key experience feature, we ensured it flowed seamlessly into the related upfitting feature. Not only did we ensure the tool became more intuitive, we even reduced the number of steps to build a vehicle from 12 to 8.

We’re confident we designed the most user-friendly implementation of a mobile BYO experience in the vertical. In fact, upon launch the site saw a 22% improvement in BYO completion rate, with those visitors being more likely to become a lead and/or estimate a payment.

We later updated this tool to completely integrate the upfitting products unique to Vans.

Inventory

We also added an inventory feature to the site, which Mathias Geisen, the head of Mercedes-Benz Vans referred to as “the best inventory search in the industry.” We have since also added the ability to purchase certified pre-owned vehicles on the website. The BYO feature provides seamless entry into this inventory experience, ensuring visitors are guided neatly through the sales funnel at all times.

Marketing Content

Though we’ve often needed to provide complex interactive solutions for Mercedes-Benz, sometimes we just needed to tell a story or explain a feature in detail–both in words and with pictures.

Vans Brand Ambassadors

Sometimes we wireframed a screen for content like this, but eventually we developed such an array of modules and design patterns to select from, that we could build new screens directly in Adobe AEM to share with the client more nimbly.

Here you see a page I designed directly in AEM for the Vans Ambassadors program using the relevant components we had designed previously. But I also created a high-level content schematic to illustrate both the content categories and their hierarchy before moving into the CMS.

We suggested a more complex, image and video-rich solution initially but the client didn’t have the assets on hand to build it out.

This is a cropped version of a longer, scrolling screen showcasing three ambassadors.

Mercedes-Benz Vans Gas Engine

Similarly, we designed this page to showcase the Van’s gas engine visually, but also to incorporate pertinent specifications and descriptive copy in ways, which are digestible and efficient, but still properly inform consumers about the product.

We also point visitors to more detailed information and tools to enable their decisions and consistently provide them with next steps—ensuring we never lead them into any “dead ends.”

The emphasis is upon “progressive disclosure”: We always provide the reader with enough relevant information in a succinct format, but also allow them to pursue more details if they are interested.

This is a cropped version of a longer, scrolling screen showcasing the gas engine and the Vans it appears in, as well as next steps and resources.

Usability Testing

I lead and organized our usability testing efforts across all Mercedes-Benz projects, including MBUSA.com, Mercedes-Benz Vans and MBFS. This entailed engaging with many different levels of testing to meet specific needs, ranging from small test runs internally with paper mockups to elaborate testing across the country utilizing third-party recruiters and facilitators. I often helped writing recruiting criteria and screeners, developing usability testing plans, and facilitating when necessary. I also lead a regular meeting in which we discussed upcoming usability testing opportunities, as well as tools and ways of testing.

I also created a detailed presentation for internal and client use in which I described a wide spectrum of ways to handling usability testing according to timing, priority and budget, which explained everything from quick and inexpensive “Lean” methods of testing with just a few users and the qualitative value it provides all the way to more traditional, remote and in-person testing with recruits and more expensive third-party facilitators.

MEANINGFUL MEASUREMENTS

Sample quantitative measurements resulting from our work on the Mercedes-Benz Vans site over several years:

• Homepage updates to Mercedes-Benz Vans enabled 700% increase in click-through, user engagement on interior pages

• Updates also resulted in 40% increase in organic homepage visitors reaching a model page; 26% increase in click throughs beneath the homepage carousel

• Our updates to the Vans model pages results in 3 times more traffic to Special Offers from these pages and doubled the visits to the Master Solutions upfitting content

• Facilitated design and improvement of build your vehicle (BYO) features, resulting in 22% improvement in BYO completion rate, as well as increases in leads and payment estimations

• Visitors using new Total Cost of Ownership tool were 5 times more likely to complete a lead form than the average user