J. Walter Thompson, the digital design agency of the Ford Division of the Ford Motor Company, needed to learn how vehicle buyers make purchase decisions in order to refine the Ford Vehicles website.
Background
Our Client: J. Walter Thompson, the digital design agency of the Ford Division of the Ford Motor Company
Product: Ford Vehicles website
Challenge: JWT needed to learn how vehicle buyers make purchase decisions in order to refine the Ford Vehicles website. JWT had less than a month—and a limited research budget—to collect data and make design decisions. Yet they wanted more insight into potential buyers’ behavior than surveys or Web metrics could reveal.
Objectives
- Observe how vehicle buyers get the information they need
- Find out what appeals to buyers about the information
- Learn what hampers buyers in collecting information
Solutions
- Adapted field research methods for short-term user research
- Conducted ten 1-hour, ethnographic interviews
- Recruited in geographically diverse cities outside Detroit
Results
- Learned key buyer behaviors to guide design, including the importance of comparison tables
- Applied findings to all levels of website redesign, from the homepage to the showroom pages
- Decreased the time it took visitors to find vital information (documented in usability testing of redesigned pages)
The JWT redesigned pages allowed for side-by-side comparisons.
