Buick Storefront
Our design-led, customer-focused e-commerce platform, offering a unified shopping experience for accessories, merchandise, and lifestyle.
Context
Foundation for Buick universal storefront
Contributions
Lead Visual Design
UX Design
Prototyping
Motion Design
Customer Journey and Roadmaps
Team
Michael Gonzalez, David Lockwood, Nate Sonnenberg, Ian Geiman
Our Vision and partership
Buick's e-commerce presence was fragmented across four separate websites: the Accessories Store, Merchandise Store, OnStar Store, and Parts Store. This disjointed structure led to customer confusion, weakened brand identity, and an inconsistent user experience. To address these issues, we set out to design a unified, customer-centric e-commerce platform that seamlessly integrates accessories, merchandise, and lifestyle into a single, cohesive storefront—streamlining the shopping journey while strengthening customer loyalty and reinforcing Buick’s brand identity.
We start with accessories, lifestyle, and merchandise as the foundation for the Buick store as we plan and anticipate Buick parts as another category for the store. Our approach focused on solving these critical challenges:
Untangling all the different platforms
Auditing pages, identifing key elements, and establishing key pages.
Identifing key commerce patterns
Creating reusable components that showcase products, highlight promotions, and support cross-selling.
Overhauling web and mobile commerce
Drafting a vision for the customer journey that aligns to Buick's goal as sophistated yet approachable.
Current Merchandise website
Current Accessories website
Untangling all the different platforms
Multiple Buick e-commerce platforms created inconsistencies in patterns and user experiences, making it feel like two separate companies. The way customers shopped for themselves versus their vehicle felt disconnected and uninspiring. To fix this, our first step in building the storefront was to reviewing the existing accessories and merchandise pages, identifying key elements, and turning them into reusable components.These components were then combined to develop the most important pages—homepage, category page, and product detail page.
These core pages provided the foundation for the platform, allowing it to adapt to our growing product lineup and yearly promotions.
Identifying and evolving key commerce components
The storefront's structure builds on existing components from our growing Buick design system while also including new components designed for our unique storefront challenges. Our components needed to be reusable across the site, display the value of all of Buick’s products, and flexible enough to highlight promotions or cross-sell vehicle accessories and merchandise—an important feature of this storefront.
Overhauling web and mobile commerce
Once we identified key pages and components, we drafted a new vision for the customer journey detailed in animations and prototypes, which helped ensure all parties were aligned on the plan: aspirational and sophisticated, but also attainable. We also considered brand-specific needs, such as vehicle fitment, while introducing new and exciting ways for customers to explore and discover products—something fresh for Buick. Additionally, our UI reflects the elevated digital tone Buick aimed to establish, setting it apart from its sister brands.
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