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.
Business need
Bring together 81 separate dealer websites into a harmonious and centralised management system
Customer demand
Consistent brand experience and ease of use across different dealer websites
My contribution
I worked alongside the Senior UX designer and the Creative director on creating a template for mazda's dealer websites.
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 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 impact of lockdowns, store closures and digital disruptors
Dealer websites - User popular pages data
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

With the fragmentation of customer experience and purchasing pathing, I, along with the design team, took a customer-centric and UX-focused approach to designing, developing and optimising the new suite of websites on Optimizely's digital experience platform (DXP).
We then 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. 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.
We outlined key user journeys and understood in which point the user will switch from the mazda.co.uk to a dealer specific section.
We then started producing different options of the low fidelity wireframes, understanding what modules work best and what information is needed. We produced a prototype of the low fidelity wireframes and tested them with the dealers to get feedback.
In October 2021, we successfully launched 81 sites within Mazda.co.uk on time, on budget and without 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.

Since launch, the new dealership websites achieved:
- 31% increase in sessions
- 21% increase in goal conversion rate
- 20% increase in visitors to the finance calculator
- 7% reduction in bounce rate
- 4% increase in average pages per session
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With vastly improved data and analytics, Mazda is now better able to drive leads and optimise conversions and journeys across the digital platform. Candyspace’s solution, enhanced by the capabilities of the Optimizely platform, is a flexible one, designed to evolve in line with the rapid changes in the automotive sector.
Absolutely delighted with the platform we have created for them.
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.
MME (mazda Europe) have been impressed at our customer centric thinking and ability to deliver on time and on budget.
Mazda are happy to work on a joint press release together, reassuring the market that Mazda is moving forwards its digital offering forward with step changes in its digital infrastructure and modernising its business post COVID.
Client's feedback
Mazda UK

Silvia cassone
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