Digital Experience Strategy

This case study covers my role as the User Experience Lead in assessing Cooper Tire's current website, providing recommendations to improve the customer experience, and creating a plan to redesign their website based on our findings and recommendations.

The Cooper Tire project was broken into three phases: Discovery, Design, and Implementation. For this case study, we'll just focus on the discovery phase.

Each track lead developed an overall strategy for the website that played a crucial role in how we tackled the redesign. I put together a Current State Audit and Competitive Analysis that helped us uncover gaps, pain points, and areas of opportunity for Cooper in the digital space.

Combining the findings of the audit with User Research artifacts provided by our client, anecdotal evidence, and a Journey Mapping Exercise, here’s a summary of what we learned:

Based on this, we knew we needed to create new content opportunities, radically simplify the experience, provide unbiased comparison and pricing tools, and ensure all touchpoints were seamlessly connected.

In an effort to get to know our clients and collaborate with them on defining the requirements for the new website, my Product Owner and I led a full day Workshop in Cooper Tire’s Detroit office.

Before jumping into the requirement gathering activities, I wanted to facilitate an exercise that would get our clients thinking about the customer first. Using the phases of the customer journey, I asked our participants to write down every thought and feeling that came to mind. For example, in the Choose phase, a person may think that all tires look the same and that may make them feel confused and overwhelmed. This exercise was similar to Empathy Mapping, with the goal being to help our audience understand the motivations, needs, and behaviours of their customers. This exercise was a great way to break the ice, evoke empathy, and show the client that we were all about customer centricity.

For the next activity, we taped up 8 opportunity areas (defined by our research) around the wall. Below each opportunity area, I included a ‘How Might We’ Statement. For example, for the Customer Guidance opportunity I asked, “How might we empower customers to be more confident while tire shopping?”. This framework helped to keep the conversation focused and stimulate our thinking throughout the session.

We walked through the opportunity areas one at time, quietly writing our ideas down on sticky notes and posting them up for everyone to see. Once we had all our ideas on the wall, we grouped them by similarity and then broke into a discussion round. There were some ideas that sparked intense discussions, and others we agreed were fundamental and obvious changes that needed to be addressed.

We synthesized the insights from the workshop, along with research provided by the team and the client to create a Customer Journey Map. This map was utilized to visualize to our clients and stakeholders how their customers might think, feel, and act at key touchpoints in the tire purchasing journey.

We also used our knowledge of Publicis Sapient's open source LEAD principles to align with our client on what makes a great experience. With these principles in mind, and everything we had learned up to this point, we were ready to kick off the Design phase.