Automotive content strategy and visual refinement

The platform is built on a card-based system to be available to thousands of end clients. In this system, I created workflow, collaborated with product owners, and developers, and created a new position for designers. While on this project I launched websites for important clients including Ford, Cadillac, and Chevrolet.

Date: 2018

My Role: Lead Art Director

Major Skills: Visual Design, Interaction Design, Content strategy, Information Architecture, client relationships

Stakeholder Objectives

Business Objective

Create a system that gave thousands of end clients a responsive, SEO friendly site with designs that were attractive and easily customizable. The designs need to be compliant with OEM standards as well as well as allow individual end users to customize the final product

My Objective

My objective and role in this project as art director my role was to partner with the OEMs to create website templates and designs that supported their brand goals. 

Team Objective

My team’s objective was to take OEM brand standards and create standardized content on the CDK base platform. These designs had to be fully compliant with brand standards while also being variable enough to meet the needs of continually updating and variable end user platforms.

Challenges

The three large challenges that we came across are:

1. Complexity of the system for users using the platform

2. Creating designs on a opinionated code base

3. All sites look the same

Challenge # 1

Complexity

The platform has given the end client a lot of control on choosing exactly what they would like their website to look like.

Layout
The layout of the page is build by the platform team as the base layer of the website. These layouts are built by the UI development team with the end clients goals in mind.

Content
Using cards the user is able to add any content that they would like to any section of the website. All of the content is organized in a content management system (CMS) that the end user is able to toggle on and off.

Configurations
The user creating an website can take the individual cards and customize them. They are able to change configurations including: amount of columns, spacing, carousal, and alignment.

Design
The addition elements such as fonts, colors, call to actions, and animations to future push the website to be original.

Challenge #2

Building templates on an opinionated based

Working with the core team who created the infrastructure of the website platform to create a base that has has few opinions how how it should be styled. By creating an ‘unopinionated’ base layer it becomes easier to place a designs later on top. The design layer holds both brand standards for automobile OEMs and dealers groups.

On top of making a design that is approved by the OEM or other clients being able to built the design the color palette that they desire. Each color palette has three colors that map out to the entire site - interaction, accent and background. These three colors are able to be changed by the user. Colors in the gray scale spectrum are also available as they do not need to be picked out by the user.

Challenge #3

Differentiation

The platform that all of the sites are built on is known to be very boxy and looks the same across dealer websites that have the same designs and default content. In order to give dealers ability to make their websites look different the designs need to have many different card styles and layout options.

By adding multiple layout options the dealers are able to make the same section of their site look very different, but it also makes setting the site even more complex. Leading into the higher learning curve of being able to set up the site in the first place.

Design Process

In June 2018 I was tasked with being the art director for Cadillac. Dealers has been on their current websites for 2+ years and were tired of the same dated look. In the rebrand I studied with my team the current Cadillac brand on their Cadillac.com site. I explored Cadillac's branding guidelines and found words that described Cadillac including: Bold, Optimistic and Sophisticated.

Design Exploration

During the design exploration phase we created a mood board that showcased the ideas for the Cadillac rebrand. Cadillac is a company that prides itself on the brand it has created and does not easily move away from the brand they created. The goal for this design was to create a new design that married Cadillac's love for what they have already created as well as being able to allow the Cadillac dealerships to show their own voice.

Presentation and Refinement

The mood boards and brand matrixes that were created where shown during presentations to internal partners as well as Cadillac brand managers in New York City. In these meetings we were able to describe our goal for the new designs and improvements we were able to make in these new sites.

An example we showcased of how we were going to improve the site is easily shown in the masthead update. Moving from a dark gray style and moving to a white

Content Strategy

The content strategy that had been chosen for Cadillac dealers back in 2015 was feeling bland. Dealers were told to pick one of three content strategies and it was recommended to them to not change the content that was curated by Cadillac themselves. After many discussions we showed Cadillac that while the brand is important at the dealer level they need to be able to create their own content.

After these discussions Cadillac allowed us to create a new content strategy that focused on the imagery that Cadillac had curated as well as allowing the dealers to move all elements around the new layout options we introduced. We created many new options for dealers to choose from that they could have a strong voice from other Cadillac dealerships.

Final Product

The website design and content that was sent out to the Cadillac website teams was highly successful. Dealers were excited to be able to make changes to their websites that were approved by Cadillac and give their sites a new look and feel.

At the end of this project two new complete designs were given to all Cadillac dealers. Within two days 30 Cadillac designers had moved to the new designs that gave them more features, and looked more like a Cadillac branded site.

Retrospective

Looking back at this project after it was finished there are lots of areas that I can see improvement to make the design even better. Throughout this project we spent a lot of time working through what we could do to make the sites look more like the Cadillac brand, but the feedback has been that dealers would like to be more unique.

If we had time to continue to work on this project I would want to spend more time with the dealers on on one to help them create beautiful websites with the tools that were given instead of just having to do it themselves or with their account managers.