A deep dive into who our users are, what they expect from a Ford ownership experience, and how we can build trust.

What’s The Big Deal?

To better understand the full scope of the own space and its problems, we created a sitemap for own’s five main areas: support, service & maintenance, account, vehicle management, and onboarding. This uncovered multiple endless loops, dead ends, and broken connections with other teams’ sites, leading to customer frustration, high time on task, and low task completion.

Dig Into the Details

We immediately dug into site analytics and site-survey responses, identifying our most visited pages, most reported frustration points, and what topics our customer support center was assisting with the most.

Creating Personas and Distributing Characteristics

The data uncovered dozens of journeys and a few strong demographics. The best way to show this to our stakeholders and teams was to categorize these down to a few personas, then put those personas through these experiences and map out the journey.

Making Them Real

Each persona was given characteristics and pain points based on real user data. We had a large variety of demographics to cover from region to tech savviness to age of vehicle, and we ended up with 7 personas.

Averaging Real User Experiences into Journey Maps

We took the main reasons users came to the own site and, using dscout and usertesting, recruited 10 participants who roughly fit each persona. Each participant went through the 4 tasks assigned to their persona type. After watching these videos and analyzing the results, we created a journey map for each of these 20 unique tasks.

Cross-Team Workshop

After putting together these artifacts, we brought the engineering teams and product teams together for a workshop. We divided everyone into persona groups, ensuring each group had representation from UX, engineering, and product. Each team went through the journeys for their persona and identified pain points and opportunities.

Empathize with Our Users

Each team presented the major pain points and opportunities they identified in each of their persona’s journeys. This lead to many discussions covering the full breadth of own. Once discussions ended, each attendee received 4 dot-voting stickers to place on the pain points and opportunities that they believed to be the most important to address. Engineering partners had yellow stickers, UX partners had pink, and product partners had the green stickers. This helped illustrate some clear themes and important opportunties across teams.

Impact

After this collaborative effort, we identified the main themes that came out on top. This lead to a prioritization exercise using an impact x effort matrix. We were able to take the findings from this workshop and prioritize roughly 2 years worth of UX work, ranging from research discoveries to quick reskins to net new experiences.