Ford.com + ReImagine
ROLE: Associate Director Experience Design / Authoring / Product Design / QA Testing / UIUX
Ford.com is a massive digital platform, focused on engaging and providing valuable experiences among all of it’s vehicle and e-commerce experiences. With so many different vehicle, product, support, and brand experiences within it’s navigation, it becomes a great resource for customers who want to learn more about their future vehicle or find more information on what they may be interested in buying.
The challenge
Between the constantly evolving experiences of mobile and web design, Ford.com sharing many different platforms, and with many more of their other platforms officially migrating into it, there needed to be better ways to bring cohesion and consistency to the overall user experience. Not only that, but keeping up with demands that are now calling for a bigger shift into Mobile-focused platform now taking priority in their market.
With so much to share in this site, how do we keep it focused into a easy-to-use experience for their customers? How do we also help establish components and guidelines for the many other teams involved with setting up their own parts of the bigger machine as well? How do we also modernize this experience while still maintaining the brand of Ford, and still tell their story? (Also how do we do this as quickly as possible)
Shifting away from a legacy
While what was originally set up for Ford.com’s design worked fine with showcasing imagery and information, it needed help and improvements to modernize and clean it up a bit more.
It needed better design principles, ways to display information in a friendlier and smaller amount, and most importantly better and consistent negative space for more breathing room around the beautiful imagery and components showcasing them.
Reimagining the strategy
While I was coming into the later half of the creation and development of updating Ford.com’s new online experience, there was a lot take on and be done before it was officially ready.
Between shifting leadership and stepping into a new role, we still had to figure out how to officially bring what we did from the Lightning 23 launch into the rest of the Ford vehicle pages. They were set to launch later that year, while also onboarding a team of designers, art directors, and writers on the new Figma process of figuring this all out.
We worked with a giant team along with strategists, to have a rollout plan for the rest of 23 and beginning of 24. Finding ways to minimize the clutter and non-essential info to tell that better story on each vehicle’s personal home page.
component library
Thanks to the amazing hard work of the team (especially Andrew Guisgand) a huge accomplishment that helped many designers and vehicle pages shift into this new focus and launch on time was taking the new design system established from the Reimagine team, and creating a linked component library system for anyone to utilize.
This not only helped with the overall process of creating sites on quicker deadlines we were facing, but also was a very helpful way to integrate some of the team into Figma that were not originally familair with it.
