How to streamline, optimise and centralise over 80 dealer websites for a frictonless customer experience

UX | UI Design
Project Overview
Buying a car is a complex business, filled with multiple considerations and dependencies that can prolong the customer journey. It became an even more complex undertaking throughout 2021, when ever-changing lockdown restrictions meant car showrooms were closed to the public.

As traditional dealerships started to compete with digital disruptors, Mazda UK’s web platforms took the front seat, rapidly becoming the central hub for customer engagement and lead conversion, creating huge demand for Mazda's dealer websites to evolve alongside changed customer buying behaviours.
Activities
• Research & analysis
• Card sorting
• Information Architecture
• User journey
• UX design
• UI design
• Prototype
Team
• Myself
• Experience director
• Senior product designer
• CMS Web developer
Having focused on maintaining brand awareness during lockdowns, it was crucial that Mazda’s dealer websites offered a natural continuation of quality and brand identity that was easily identifiable for customers moving further down their purchase journey. However, 81 separate websites presented a variety of challenges, from inconsistent experience and complicated customer journeys to reduced brand identity and lack of central management.
The impact of lockdowns, store closures and digital disruptors
The inconsistency across the dealership websites meant customers were experiencing a varied quality of service and interaction depending on which local site they were visiting. Mazda engaged Candyspace to improve the consistency and optimise the experience of the dealer websites for their customers, while improving internal operational efficiencies by reducing the cost and time it takes to update individual sites. In Spring 2021, the Candyspace team consulted a large range of stakeholders, including the team at Mazda, selected dealers, and website users, to understand what different expectations they had of their experience with the sites.
The challenge

Approach

Research
This initial research stage highlighted three key issues:
‍
- A lack of consistency across websites, resulting in complex and disjointed customer experience.
- Poor visibility of the ROI of each individual site due to numerous different dealership sites, all at different levels of functionality.
- No centralisation of experience, meaning there were few opportunities for personalisation or optimisation of lead conversion
Survey
The team and I did a survey for the dealers to understand what they felt about the current Mazda-managed dealership website solutions. Most valuable pages for dealers matched up well with the user usage data and a key takeaway was for dealers to be able to more easily change their available offers.
Card sorting
We then did a card sorting exercise for the 5 dealers for the key pages of the dealer websites. With all that information we started creating a content map and template structure.
Key user journey
We outlined key user journeys and understood at which point of the journey the user will switch from the mazda.co.uk to a dealer specific section.
Low and High fidelity wireframes
We then started producing different options of low and high fidelity wireframes, understanding what modules work best and what information is needed. We produced a prototype and tested them with the dealers to get feedback.
Launch
We successfully launched 81 sites within Mazda.co.uk on time, on budget and without major technical issues.

With a fresh, centralised site, Mazda were now able to provide streamlined user journeys with clear call-to-actions throughout the purchasing process, with better reporting and tracking.


Results


Since launch, the new dealership websites achieved:

With vastly improved data and analytics, Mazda is now better able to drive leads and optimise conversions and journeys across the digital platform. My team’s solution, enhanced by the capabilities of the Optimizely platform, was a flexible one, designed to evolve in line with the rapid changes in the automotive sector.
"We are absolutely delighted with the platform we have created for the dealers.
The service throughout the project was impeccable, with our team expertly managing the clients expectations and interdependencies with 3rd parties without fault or issue.
You have been solution focussed and flexible throughout the project, coming up with clever on the fly ideas to enhance the customer experience whilst working within the technical limitations that Mazda UK are forced to work within.
The dealers are especially happy at how smooth the transition has been and are anecdotally volunteering they are receiving more leads than previously.
Ma Europe impressed at our customer centric thinking and ability to deliver on time and on budget."

Mazda UK
Silvia cassone
Linkedin