Mitsubishi Motors Australia

Mitsubishi Motors Australia is part of Mitsubishi Motors Corporation, based in Tokyo, Japan. The company is a leader in plug-in hybrid electric vehicle technology and is known for their superior vehicle engineering. Mitsubishi Motors Australia has a network of around 200 dealers and service centres across Australia. In the Australian market, Mitsubishi is among the top 10 most popular brands, ranked at number 5 in 2022, competing with Toyota, Mazda, Ford, Kia and Hyundai.

Contribution
UX design

Team
Flynn Wheeler, Daren Wilding, Miles Cox

Agency
Merkle

Year
2022

The challenge

Mitsubishi had recently replatformed their public-facing website, however, not all of the content that needed to exist, existed at that time. Since the replatform, new content had been created and did not have a suitable home on the public-facing website. This resulted in content being housed in hard-to-find places on the website, making navigation difficult and a business hunch that important information took too long for customers to find.

I was engaged by Merkle to redesign the information architecture and navigation patterns of Mitsubishi's public-facing website. This engagement was part of a larger program of work to help Mitsubishi become one of the top three automotive sellers in Australia. The redesign needed to improve the relevance and findability of content; accomodate marketing campaigns, guide customers through their purchasing or servicing journey and deliver a consistent and memorable brand experience.

Research

I collated all the existing research that Mitsubishi had acquired from past agencies. I noticed that the personas primarily focussed on private and business prospects and excluded owners and internal users, like customer support and the Mitsubishi dealerships. I created a research plan to learn more about these user groups. I organised interviews with various department managers to understand how the public website was being used or affected their area of work. The key takeaways were:

CS receive a high volume of tickets for information readily available on the website
Employees felt that the Mitsubishi brand wasn’t being fully conveyed through the website
Lack of availability of data to better understand how digital plays a role in their sales
The sale of parts and accessories weren't accomodated for
Specifications of model variations weren't accomodated for

I conducted a content audit to understand the content and hierarchy of information. I created a tree jack test and invited 30 participants to complete six tasks to understand how the current navigation tree was performing. There were many nominated responses in each of the tasks which suggested that users were unsure of where to find information on the website or that the labels in the navigation were not clear.

This assumption was supported by the interviews I conducted with 6 customers – private prospects, business prospects and Mitsubishi owners. I wanted to understand what information mattered to prospects when searching for a new vehicle, and what information was top of mind for Mitsubishi owners. When searching for a new vehicle, customers were primarily concerned with the category of vehicle (SUV, utility, sedan, van, electric, small-car), price, colours and features. It became clear that there was an opportunity to provide customers with much more information than was currently being displayed in the navigation.

Information architecture

I reorganised the content of the website into categories to ensure that similar information was grouped accordingly in the navigation. I created an open card sort to test my assumptions of the categories and refine the navigation tree.

I organised the vehicles into car categories to simplify the car selection process in the navigation. We wanted to make sure that the labels being used were familiar to customers, whilst also accurately representing the services being provided. I conducted comparative research to see how other vehicle manufacturers labelled information to understand what terms were commonly used. Our team came up with two options for the vehicle categories:

Standard categories – sedan, hatchback, SUV, utility, Van, 4WD
Lifestyle categories – family, off-road, small car, workmate

I created a prototype to test the ease of navigation using these two types of car categories. Participants were comfortable with the standard categories, especially because prospective buyers were likely to research across multiple brands and come across the same categories.

UX & wireframes

The most complex part of the navigation was the vehicles menu, which listed all the available Mitsubishi vehicles. I created wireframes for the mobile site and later designed the desktop version. The existing mobile menu was housed in an accordion mechanism. After each accordion was expanded, the menu became a long list of navigation items. This felt like a cumbersome interaction pattern, so I explored options for a full-screen mobile menu.

I produced high-fidelity wireframes for usability testing. After the team and I felt confident with the user experience of the menu, I conducted another tree jack test, which revealed a much shorter task duration. I conducted two rounds of unmoderated usability testing. I learnt that people had trouble deciphering the difference between two of the terms we used in the top level navigation – "range" and "buy and discover" – participants didn't separate the research process from the purchase moment in their minds.

Another nuance we had to consider in the design was how to display state-specific prices to the customer. There are 8 states in Australia, each with its own pricing for the vehicles. This required the user to provide their location and their purchase intention (business versus private) in order to accurately present the price.

The current site addressed this nuance by duplicating the vehicle showroom pages. Users were able to toggle the content depending on whether they were a business or private buyer. The approach felt clunky and unresolved, so the I explored solutions that combined the user's location and customer type into a global setting in the primary navigation.

UI & visual refinement

I worked with Flynn to refine the visual experience of the navigation. We worked together on the selection of iconography, labelling and layout. In practice, there was very little separation between our roles. We also made recommendations on the landing pages, including

A consistent format for all FAQ pages
Merging similar pages and cutting out irrelevant content
Introducing a tertiary navigation style for feature landing pages
The removal of the floating action bar at the bottom of the screen