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Client Work

Lexus: Adventure in Car Customization

(Background)
During my time at team one I was tasked with redesigning our car customization tool. I conducted a week long design sprint running research & competitive analysis, concepting, prototyping, user testing exercises and a design review at the end of the design sprint.
ux design, research, prototyping, competitive analysis, user testing.
(Role)

The Ask

Redesign the customization experience because there we needed a more immersive way to sell customers on their desire to own a Lexus.
Take analogous inspiration from creating avatars in video games like Destiny & Anthem, and apply it to the car customization process to make it engaging.

Opportunity

The New Customization Experience

Stepper

The stepper UI lets users know exactly where they are in the process. Serving as a way to aid their customization story. Using the granular approach, I stripped down the exterior process to contain color, wheel and grill tabs.

Exterior & Interior

I designed the color, wheel, & grill components for exterior and interior to have some overlap for reusability, because at the time myself and some of the UX team were creating a new design system for Lexus.com.

Packages are shown without the visual clutter in the previous design. Users can access more details on packages via the tooltip next to the titles.
The card components were also designed to be reusable across the 'Options' section in the customization process.

Packages & Options

The summary page shows your final customization details with an option to change individual components without having to restart the whole process. Making the interior, exterior and other components reusable also helped in designing the summary module.

Summary

Stepper

The stepper UI lets users know exactly where they are in the process. Serving as a way to aid their customization story. Using the granular approach, I stripped down the exterior process to contain color, wheel and grill tabs.

Exterior & Interior

I designed the color, wheel, & grill components for exterior and interior to have some overlap for reusability, because at the time myself and some of the UX team were creating a new design system for Lexus.com.

Packages & Options

Packages are shown without the visual clutter in the previous design. Users can access more details on packages via the tooltip next to the titles. The card components were also designed to be reusable across the 'Options' section in the customization process.

Summary

The summary page shows your final customization details with an option to change individual components without having to restart the whole process. Making the interior, exterior and other components reusable also helped in designing the summary module.

Process

I spent a full week working on this, with some guidance from my UX team at Team One.

Day 1: Research

To begin, I conducted a heuristic audit of Lexus’ customization tool to understand where there could be room for improvement in its UX.
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After discovering areas with room for improvement, I ran a competitive analysis of other luxury car brands, out-of-category brands like Nike, and video games to learn best practices. I then grouped their customization tool experience into two groups: effortless and effortful content. The following brands fell in the effortless category:
In Category: Genesis & Volvo
  • The major goal for the customization tool from a UX perspective was to make the process as effortless, and explorative, as possible
  • Better contextual visuals of vehicles when users are customizing
  • Users should have a clear hierarchy of the different stages in the process
Out of Category: Nike, Anthem
In Nike’s ID process, every part of the shoes are broken down and users are given full range for customization. They reinforce the notion of shoes being tied to your personality

UX Goals for Lexus Customization Tool

Day 2: Ideating & Wireframing

Volvo, Nike, and Anthem examples studied in the competitive audit had a similar concept: a 'granular approach'. I was really inspired by the stripped down/granular way they designed their process. I decided to use that as the baseline for my concepting phase. The granular approach gives users a true sense of connection, ownership, and adventure, which is what we wanted to convey in the experience.

Check out my mad man ravings below:

Day 3: Prototype

Taking all the insight and inspiration from my user research & conception phase, I began bringing my initial sketches to life in preparation for user testing to get validation. While I worked on this, I was also on another project helping to setup guidelines for our new design system. With this in mind I strived to make my designs modular components that could be reused throughout the system.
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I broke down the exterior into three parts: color, wheel, and grill. Color is one part of a car’s personality but its true persona shines through the wheels and grill

Day 4: User Testing & Validation

With some assistance from my UX researcher colleague, I crafted some questions script for testing +Build Tool Test Script. I tested the design with Lexus customers, people who were looking to buy new vehicles, and generally adventurous shoppers. A snapshot of the responses I received are below:
  • Wanting to see more visuals on the summary page
  • Hard to tell if the Standard and F switches were clickable

Moving forward, I used the feedback to iterate my final designs.

Using testing feedback on the summary, I decided to lay out all the details in an 'avatar' format (just like in its done in video games). This lets them see everything with the ability to make necessary changes.

The tab switcher for car styles was changed to a dropdown so its more intuitive for our users. Our previous designs also lacked iconography, and relied heavily on text. The new iconography gives more feature details instantly.

Day 5: Design Review & Takeaways

What I enjoyed most about this project was being able to use my learned experience as a gamer and sneakerhead to influence the new direction of our customization tool experience. It was a great way to add an element of storytelling to UX design.

In our review session, I received useful critique on all stages of the customization process. It was generally well received by my colleagues, along with notes on areas for improvement.

View Prototype
One thing my team loved, was the ability to pick up where you left off in a previous customization session, by using cookies, because it would save out users so much time. This was also inspired 'save & continue' features of games.
Next Project
Made with ❤️ by Tobi Oluwo

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