MERCEDES-BENZ VANS

WORKSHOP and goals

The ultimate goal of OneWeb Vans is to integrate all different touchpoints within the vans universe on one single platform. The first step in this was to replace the existing vans website. After accomplishing this and the successful rollout of a first set of templates and components, it became important to evolve OneWeb Vans in order to be able to integrate the variety of content of such touchpoints. Due to a close time schedule, we primarily focused on campaigns and web specials. For this, we conducted a workshop with twelve participants, including stakeholders, product owners, designers, and business executives. My part in this was to plan and develop the workshop, as well as to conduct it and to evaluate its outcomes. With the help of group discussions and working groups, we analyzed campaigns along of the product lifecycle and user journey, collected loves and pains, created new ideas how to integrate important content, and finally voted on a set of possible new modules.

Analyzing, optimizing, testing

Within the first months of my time working on the project, my main task was to optimize modules as well as testing the website's usability. I played a major role in creating an eLearning platform, where modules and templates are explained to all the content managers who then could easily work with the platform. During this time I was part of several user testings, user interviews and ideation sessions on existing patterns and modules. I also did a big part of the front-end specification and contributed to a number of CMS trainings for over a dozen countries.

Learnings

This project and taught me a lot of different things: New abilities and approaches when working with a highly complex and international project, for a client such as Daimler where politic is a big factor of the process itself. I had the opportunity to view things from a highly detailed and functional perspective, how to work with existing design systems and learned how to design for a variety of stakeholders and markets, that all bring their own set of requirements. It taught me how to operate in truly big teams, where you have to take into account design, development and maintenance and to actively ask and involve all departments. 

More importantly, even, I learned plenty of things about myself. Where I see my strengths, my interests, how I picture my future and what is important to me within a project as well as within a team. After learning a lot about how to concept the very details of complex project, and how to take into account almost anything, I realized one thing the most: nothing matters as much to me as a purposeful, usable product which does not satisfy the needs of markets but of solves those of the user.