Mitsubishi Motors Project
Mitsubishi commissioned Isobar / Accordant to develop a ground-up rebuild of their public website, working with a third-party supplier developing a new product database for the entire vehicle and accessory range.
My Role
Lead UX Designer
The new Mitsubishi site needed to act as a foundation for a multi-year roadmap of digital marketing and promotion projects for the organisation.
I served as Lead UX Designer from initial Discovery and Research through to the launch of the site, and worked with a Lead UI Designer to develop a design approach that would complement the client’s visual branding, image, and video resources, and allow marketing to build cutomised pages for different vehicles and different audiences.
DISCOVERY
To understand the needs of the Mitsubishi Marketing and Business teams:
Planned and facilitated a series of workshops to gather information on the goals, measures of success and potential risks of the project,
Conducted stakeholder interviews with heads of marketing, product design, accessories, and fleet sales teams, and
Worked with Magento developers to understand how the vehicle product database was structured and categorised.
To understand how customers approached the car buying process:
I reviewed Mitsubishi’s existing customer and market research,
Conducted a series of in-person interviews and a wider online survey with recent new car buyers, and
Undertook a contextual enquiry with dealers at Mitsubishi's Liverpool franchise.
Outcomes
A set of behavioural personas for different types of car buyers.
A customer journey that identified key points that customers were likely to visit the site, and what their expectations and needs would be.
A set of key features and properties of vehicles that different buyers valued.
INSIGHTS
Learnings from this research:
buyers generally visit manufacturer websites very early in their journey, or very late just before purchase.
new car buyers require widely varying levels of detail about a vehicle before committing to buy, from general vehicle aesthetics to detailed technical safety specifications.
these requirements vary greatly even between different buyers of the same vehicle type
after deciding on a shortlist of vehicles, visiting a dealer accelerates making a final purchase.
Outcomes
An approach to content strategy and information hierarchy to give customers enough information to feel confident in contacting a dealer, without overwhelming them with detail.
An approach to module customisation to provide Mitsubishi the flexibility to rapidly update and modify the site to accommodate new vehicles, promotional campaigns, and offers.
A set of preliminary wireframes exploring how pages could be structured using a “toolbox” of modules.
APPROACH
The core design decision was to treat the site as a content system that marketing could operate, not a fixed set of pages requiring developer involvement every time vehicle positioning or promotional focus changed.
I developed a modular template framework that allowed:
Vehicle pages to be constructed from reorderable content modules, with marketing able to adjust the sequence per vehicle
The same vehicle page to present different content hierarchies for different customer types, swapping featured imagery and leading with different specifications without duplicating the underlying page
Dealer contact information to be pulled into a standardised template based on user postcode, giving every vehicle page a consistent and low-friction path to local dealer contact
The vehicle configurator was a central feature of the site and required particular care. Rather than presenting the full range of options and disabling invalid combinations, the configurator was designed to surface only the options available at each step based on what had already been selected. The result was a guided process that felt considered rather than restrictive, and reflected the actual constraints of the product database without exposing their complexity to the user.
This approach required close collaboration with Mitsubishi's development team to ensure the design reflected what was technically achievable within the existing database architecture.
OUTCOMES
The site launched as a fully operational platform and a content system the Mitsubishi marketing team could run in-house.
Rather than requiring external development for routine updates, the team had a toolbox to manage vehicle showroom pages, update configuration options as new models and variants were released, and maintain dealer information across the network.
User tracking and personalisation functionality were built into the site from launch, providing Mitsubishi with behavioural data to inform the priorities of future development rather than relying on assumptions.
The success of the project is documented in an Adobe case study on Mitsubishi Motors Australia's customer-first digital experience.