In Brief
The Need: Redesign Dealer Navigator’s visuals so that outside partners can use it in a customized or lender-neutral fashion.
Skills In This Case Study:
- Experience Design
- Visual Design
- Brand Identity
- Art Direction
The Result: An experience that not only satisfied our internal needs for a lender neutral and customized product, but also sealed the partnership between our company and a major carmaker’s lending arm.
Refined Requirements
Dealer Navigator was made available for outside lenders as a scalable lender customized and lender-neutral experience.
The aim was to diversify revenue streams, increase subscribers, and strengthen the brand of the platform.
Initial requirements then became two requirement sets: Product requirements would be scalable and support minimal to full function experiences. Brand requirements would also be scalable, ranging from zero brand representation to full-fledged, high-polish design.
Research
Having refined requirements, research took place:
1. Automaker brand research at enterprise and dealer levels, looking at design elements in detail.
2. Research into company UX design standards and previous work to square those against product requirements.
3. Additional research into our brand at the greater enterprise level and within our line of business.
Synthesis
Our scalable product and brand approach was confirmed in competitor research for both SaaS products as well as marketing efforts.
How we approach our brand was similar to that of our competitors and potential lending partners.
As a result of these two points, we escalated a need to discuss the brand identity of the Dealer Navigator platform itself.
Ideation and Design
With two sets of requirements and research insights in hand, a series of designs were built showing high brand representation down to minimal viable product.
Color experiments were also conducted to set up color palette options for the requirements.
Each set of designs were presented with a decision matrix to reinforce recommendations made to the potential partner.
A Brand Conundrum
Naming of the lender-customizable product was complex, with a great deal of discussion needed to determine its place within the greater business.
A joint decision was made to create a visual that was on the knife’s edge between a distinct brand and logo as part of a suite of products.
Brand and art direction expertise were applied during this part of the process.
The Decision: Flexible Scalability
For this immediate partner, a non-branded, minimum viable product version would be built, followed by versions with additional brand representation and function as the relationship and needs change.
The experience for the user is determined at login. Depending on their login, the user would be directed to one of three experiences:
1. The company’s pre-existing internally branded experience with the functions that are part of the partnership agreement.
2. An experience customized to the partner (outside lender or otherwise), with the associated functions and brand representation as part of the partnership agreement.
3. A neutral experience with associated partnership functions but a brand identity presenting only the SaaS platform’s name and wordmark.
Kit Young Creates 