Car Reviews

BBC TOP GEAR - NEWS AND REVIEWS WEBSITE FOR CAR ENTHUSIASTS

As part of a wider project looking to re-platform and redesign the website, the brief was to reinvent Top Gear’s digital experience to allow for content to grow, expand our audience traffic and increase user engagement, while aligning to the BBC’s Design System.

  • Goals

    Bring together and redesign the templates used by the editorial team to link them into a cohesive journey and experience for the car buying audience. The solution needed to work within technical limitations and take into account editorial requirements, SEO recommendations as well as cater for different User Personas.

  • My role

    Mid weight UX Designer. I was embedded in a cross-functional team working closely with the Senior UX Designer, Back End Developers and Editors. I was in charge of carrying out Generative Research and Usability Testing, defining the IA and User Journeys, and wireframing.

  • Tools and Platforms

    Main design and prototyping software was Figma. Dropbox paper was used for documentation, and JIRA for planning and breaking up tasks.

    This was a responsive web project.

 The problem

Car Reviews represents the main source of revenue due to the ability to display ads and partnerships. However, 

  • The three existing review types are disjointed

  • This means users have limited journeys to and from each content type

  • Buying intent is lacking and the site has incurred in some penalisation from SEO perspective because of this

The main challenge I came across was improving the existing templates without major changes to the CMS structure, while ensuring we fulfilled our users’ buying needs.

The first thing I did was to make sure the team and I understood who our users are and what needs they have when it comes to purchasing cars.

Understand the audience

I started by gathering knowledge from the most senior stakeholders. I then put together a survey to validate long-standing assumptions and dug deeper to define our User Personas on the basis of criteria such as

  • Motoring content consumption habits

  • Knowledge levels and reasons behind purchase

  • General affinity to the brand

Define

With these Personas in mind, I recruited and interviewed participants to understand what worked and what didn’t in the existing offering. I then identified three key opportunity areas that needed attention

  1. Ensuring key information is easy to access and scan

  2. Restructuring tab navigation to reflect user expectations and buying needs

  3. Introducing comments to satisfy the need to read about other owners’ experience with the car

Test and iterate

I used Hi-Fi prototypes to test and evaluate the proposed solutions. By identifying outstanding issues and pain points, I was able to recommend necessary improvements such as

  • Helping to build trust between reader and reviewer

  • Reassuring users that prices were up to date

  • Facilitating access to model derivatives

Learnings and considerations

This project taught me a great deal about the UI side of the design process. I actively contributed to the visual design and worked closely with Front End Developers to define the best solutions.

It was also an invaluable opportunity to build closer working relationships between the newly formed UX team and the Creative, Editorial, and Advertising teams. By opening up the UX process to stakeholders and involving them in decision making and user testing, I was able to build trust and alignment, while ensuring UCD principles were followed.

The Car Review Ecosystem was launched in 2021 and brings the most traffic to the site.