Mercedes me

"Help us re-envision owners platform that suits U.S. customers’ needs"

Mercedes-Benz USA asked Razorfish to re-envision the digital experience for Mercedes owners. With the current platform, MBUSA customers were experiencing a fragmented digital experience and had to go through several websites to find information or features they were looking for. For example, they were struggling to find critical information about their leases and warranty, as there were siloed databases and platforms.

There already was a global initiative to create a consolidated web platform for owners, but rather than adopting the global platform, MBUSA wanted a new, elevated solution that fits their premium brand perception in the United States.

OUR SOLUTION

This was a three-part project over two years.

Phase 0

Crafting a 3-year Vision and Building a Roadmap

Phase 1

Building a Foundational Web Platform

Phase 2

Expanding with a Native App

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The process

We came up with a vision for a personalized platform that recognizes a customer’s needs and serves their needs, proactively. I played a crucial role in defining the framework of the digital experience through a series of hackathon-style ideations with a multi-disciplinary team of five people, one of whom was our direct client.
 

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The outcome

With the ideas from the workshops, I created a construct of the digital experience and a conceptual website prototype which I used in an internal concept testing. Based on the findings from the testing, we presented our final output and the 3-year roadmap to our client and their headquarters in Germany.

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PHASE 1

Build a foundational web platform

Our first step to achieve the vision was building a minimum viable version of the web platform that streamlines customer’s access to their account and vehicle information. 

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Bringing vision to reality

To have a clear understanding of how much of our vision can be achieved within the current back-end system, I spearheaded the feasibility investigation with our tech lead. This helped us to ensure that our initial launch product was a Minimum Viable Product but also useful and lovable.

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From stakeholders to supporters

Once we understood our boundaries, we ensured that we were incorporating all the resources and functionalities that make a difference in the customer experience. I played a lead role in running workshops with several department managers at MBUSA to leverage their customer insights across the whole service ecosystem, while helping them accelerate their effort to expand customer loyalty through a digital platform.

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Team mentorship

With all the learnings, we designed our responsive web platform. During the detail design process, I managed a UX designer and mentored a functional analyst to create and annotate the responsive web experience.

The outcome

When we launched the first phase of the U.S. version of Mercedes me, we celebrated the high migration rate to the new platform and completion rate (about 70%) for the new onboarding flow. This also opened up an excellent opportunity for MBUSA to validate and update customers’ profile information.

With the successful launch, more stakeholders at MBUSA saw their potential in our project and became enthusiastic about participating in a modern digital experience that services customers in every aspect of vehicle ownership.
 

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Inclusive Design Process

I kicked off the project with an ideation session that involved the entire project team across all disciplines. It was an opportunity for everyone to think like a customer and become a UX designer for the day. I was able to help each member of the team start to have ownership of the vision we were creating. This led us to a continuous collaboration between designers and tech team that allowed us to find simple solutions to work around any limitations we had.

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Data-driven Design Process.  

After our initial ideation session, it became clear that the new app should be hyper-focused to the features that customers need on a frequent basis, rather than carrying over all the features from the web platform on top of the new remotes functionalities. To prioritized them, I gathered current analytics data from the Mercedes me web platform and the 3rd-party mobile app that provided remote vehicle management features. I also conducted a series of customers interviews to understand how they use the current app and other competitors’ apps.

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More Powerful Personalization

During the second phase of this project, the Mercedes me platform became capable of greater personalization. The UX team had the opportunity to create truly tailored digital experience leveraging more accurate data on vehicle usage and lease status, while our tech team worked hard to integrate with more databases and workflows.

Based on the personalization framework from the previous work track, I mentored a team UX designers to expand our personalization strategy and create personalized user interface and content.

How to empower logic-first thinking with customer-first thinking. 

To build a framework for personalization, it was critical to work with the technology team during the design process. Through a series of collaborative work sessions with back-end developers, I was able to influence tech flow design with UX thinking. It was a great opportunity to learn their thought process and overcome the ‘language barrier’ between designers and technologists.

How to define a minimum lovable product.  

As the Mercedes me platform has become the one-stop-shop for all the owners’ needs, we had to build a strong case to convince our client why we were limiting them to specific features. After several discussions where I explained the pros and cons for the users, we finally met in the middle.