This was our interview stakeholder guide that we would use bespoke for each brand and for each brands unique 3-5 stakeholders. We used competitor examples as well as a myriad of examples we collected for the specific brand to start to get their feedback.

All of the responses, 4-6 interviews per brand, were affinity molded and categorized, does this input have to do with quality? Aesthetics? Benchmarking? Are there common threads that can transform into design principles? Often times we would get feedback from leadership that was the same, both leaders used the term “upscale” when in reality they meant two different things. This exercise also helped align our language between leadership and the team.

That allowed us to take some of the key verbatim’s for us to understand what we want and don’t want to hear when describing the UX. 

And really helped drive some key attributes that the brand had to strike the balance of in order to be successful. This helped begin the process of creating a set of crosshairs for the team to target.

This was a pivotal moment that illuminated the new way for us to work but that was just the beginning, I also collaborated with the design studios and brand team members to get to the core of the brand and align to the same demographic and an metaphors as well.  You can see here going from left to right the board becomes more complete, identifying key products that we can compare across the brands but ultimately turning into an essence board which became the summary 10,000 foot view for the visual brand direction. This process wasn’t just about stakeholder alignment but also about communication of the brand to our teams.

This would then transition to the aligned imagery that the entire leadership staff bought into driven by our UX team that defined what a brands in vehicle visual identity should be inspired by and look and feel like. This was one of the earlier drafts for the beginning of the vision guide as it took shape. The vision guides became an incredible asset to our teams to understand the scope and essence of the brand they were designing for. As our work evolved we started to create sizzle videos as a communication tool back to leadership that tied into and reinforced the brand and helped illustrate the bigger picture for leadership.

This approach was the path we followed and repeated for all brands, dozens of stakeholders, numerous products and hundreds of images per brand narrowed down to the core selected content to focus on.

The content started to evolve, we crafted the format into easy to digest UX Vision books for the brands. Even one page executive summaries when needed. This was critical for us to share with stakeholders, the studios, engineering, product development, software and marketing. This reduced communication breakdown, project swirl and inconsistent siloing immensely by enacting this process, enforcing, communicating and aligning the core cross disciplinary teams.

These vision book were also used by our UX team to reinforce our UX guidelines, best practices, design system, components and 3d rendering assets etc. Overtime updates would be made and more content would be added as it was ready, iconography, micro animations, software releases, etc.