Acura.ca – a digitalized luxury selling experience

Overall Objectives

A new responsive automotive website created to deliver inspiring content and premium product positioning. Compelling visuals are used throughout the site to reinforce the brand spirit and elevate its emotional engagement and appeal.

Market Research & Site Analysis

The team did extensive research including gathering data from the old site to leveraging knowledge from various automotive consumer studies (ex. Google ThinkAuto consumer study). Based on the analysis, we identified 4 key objectives that the new site needed to address.

Firstly, improvement on links integration to increase visibility and awareness of all Acura offerings.Secondly, focus on user-centric visual engagement and provide fewer clicks to engage users with visually enhanced Interior, Technology, Design, and Safety content.

Thirdly, convince consumers that Acura is a luxury brand that resonates with their lifestyle.

Lastly, establish different user profiles (shoppers vs. owners), and evaluate respective user interactions to drive more traffic to dealerships. Successfully selling the first Acura vehicle to the shoppers is import, but building experience for owners is equally important as to prolong future engagement and selling opportunities.

Benchmarking & Auditing

With the intent of elevating Acura’s brand appeal, we looked at other luxury automoitve sites and examined their art direction approaches and positionings. Striking and compelling imagery with minimal visual clusters is the key to showcase the essence of the luxury brands.

Quick Glance of the New Design

Demonstrating the new homepage and model pages in 120 sec.

The Radically Simplified Homepage

The new homepage leverages elegant design and large images to emphasize the thrill of driving and the spirited harmony between man and machine. All touts can display distinct and useful content to different users based on their site activities.

Planning and optimizing the page flow is an important part of the process before jumping into the visual design stage. To ensure the same visual impact of the desktop experience is brought to the mobile environment, the team and I created the wireframes to explore possible ways of user interaction.

Site assessment enabled us to prioritize Acura services and products and organize the navigation items. We created a large side drawer menu to allow for generous size and spacing.

The Modular Model Pages 

The model pages consist of 6 sections. The 2 key sections are the Overview and the Features pages, which are designed in a highly versatile and flexible modular structure. To distinguish each model’s personality, the pages are comprised of interchangeable module components that can vary in order for each model.

Various modules are created to encompass different model highlights and to encourage users to discover performance and luxury features. The interactive modules showcase various modes or types of features.

Certain modules allow users to view details in the overlay or in the drawer which provides richer content to the model and supports the brand’s position in the market.

Gallery, Packages, Accessories and Specifications pages are non-modular, yet can be easily updated and maintained.

Build and Price

Lead generation and conversion is the main objective of this tool. Our goal is to provide a compelling and intuitive user experience with a clear path for the target audience to understand, to test drive, and to purchase.

We wanted this tool to help reduce research time for customers, empower them to self discovery, and less hand holding required by the dealers. In order to incorporate the data properly – we worked closely with the back-end developers, the product owners, and the UX researchers to facilitate both functional and business requirements.

Find a Showroom

Find a Showroom a.k.a. Dealer Locator is a key section that connects the digital experience with the physical transaction and conversion. With the idea that the majority of the users are using this tool on the go – we tackled this tool with a mobile-first approach.

To ensure the dealer locator supports the conversion and help to lead the potential customers to the physical dealerships, we created the user flows and see how this tool connects with all the necessary dots and pages.

Knowing that Google Map is one of the most popular mapping apps, we decided to incorporate the Google Map functionality to create a frictionless and familiar searching experience for the users. We established a List vs. Map View filtering option for easy navigation of the search results.

For the desktop dealerships search results, we leveraged a similar experience from Google Maps. We kept the interactive map easy to navigate and had the listing portion easy to browse by distance.

On the showroom details pages, we included information that adds value – such as a showroom photo that helps users visualize the surroundings, the contact information, the associated collision centre partners, and the key CTAs that drive users to connect with the point-of-sale.

Styleguide Extracts

Acura’s UI simplifies the design to let the vehicle images become the hero of the site. Every element across the site was made to follow these guidelines.

Role: Art Direction, UX/UI

–
Creative Director: Colin Craig
Designers: Nancy Ng, Yuko Brown, Iris Wu
Studio Designers: Jason Pearl, Teegan Skals
Agency: Grip Limited
Client: Acura Canada
Year: 2015—2018