The Project

• Excite users about the upcoming Land Rover Defender.

• Educate potential customers about the extensive list of accessories.

• Promote the Defender as the most customisable vehicle on the 4x4 market.

My Role

I led the UX aspect of the project. I researched and fully immersed myself with the accessories, of which there were over 150 of them. I worked alongside a designer on the concept and design of the tool. I also liaised with other UX designers to make sure the tool with within the wider delivery of the Defender projects.

Setting the questions

Once the accessories matrix was finalised, it gave me a clear idea of what groups of users we were looking at. I paired these groups with several personas we were given and they matched, thus providing us with some idea that we were going in the right direction. The questions were quite straightforward but required fine-tuning from the copywriter to make sure they were correct for the Land Rover brand. The questions focused on where the user lived (countryside, urban, rural, beach, mountainside, etc), where they worked, what their hobbies were and who they lived with. By gathering this information we were confident we could attribute accessories to the user's responses. For example, if the user lived in the city and went kayaking with their friends at the weekend we could serve them relevant accessories such as kayak racks, storage bins and portable wash kits.

Gathering assets

Setting the questions required us to gather assets at the same time to help us provide answers. For each question, I looked at the accessories matrix to determine where we could have a possible answer. If we looked at the question where the user lived and we have accessories like mud flaps and rubber floor mats we can make the hypothesis that a user could live in a muddy location like the countryside. Therefore, alongside the designer, we would search for assets that featured the countryside and mud. For each question, we gathered a large number of assets, above 50 assets in some cases. After several rounds of internal testing within Spark, we refined the number of images, but also added more in areas that we may not have considered more such as countries with extreme weather, that we may not encounter in the UK. One of the insights we noticed during the testing was several users were quite literal in their selections, for example, if they had two kids, they would only select images with children in them. We also noticed other users selected images that weren’t necessarily representative of their lifestyle, but more aspirational as well. This was a minor concern as it would likely produce an incorrect result for the user.