CX for you, UX for all: Hyundai.com Global Website Renewal

CLIENT

DATE

SERVICE

INDUSTRY

Hyundai Motors Company

2022.01

CXUX Consulting, Human-Centered Creative Design

Automotive/Mobility

The Hyundai Motor Company’s global website redesign project has commenced with the aim of completely refreshing the customer experience in line with changes in the global market. By gathering specific requirements from around the world and leveraging the latest digital tools to drive user-centered design, we aim to strengthen Hyundai’s brand image and market leadership.

Hyundai Motor Company, a global automaker, introduced the world’s first mass-produced hydrogen car and luxury brand GENESIS. With a vision of “progress for humanity,” Hyundai leads in tech advancements for a brighter future.

The Re-design of Hyundai Motor’s Global Website, Cooperation with Saltcake

In 2021, Hyundai Motor Group emerged as one of the world’s top four automakers¹⁾, producing an annual total of 6.68 million vehicles. This growth is seen as the anticipated reward for their efforts in product development, marketing, and branding to enter global markets.

However, during this period, Hyundai Motor faced various challenges in the automotive market. They encountered challenges such as New Mobility innovations like Autonomous Driving and Software Defined Vehicles (SDV), the transition to Electrification represented by Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), and the rapid changes in Customer Digital Experience (CXD) due to Covid-19.

<Figure: Hyundai.com countries that launched Global Website – 19 countries 28 Websites>

Hyundai Motor operates Hyundai.com separately for overseas customers on a country-by-country basis. Countries with high sales volumes such as the United States, the EU, Russia, and China have the resources to build and operate their own websites independently. However, other countries utilize a single global website template to operate Hyundai.com.

The global website template, which had been in use for six years after its redesign, faced obsolescence issues. Therefore, plans for a comprehensive redesign began in 2020, and the full-scale redesign project commenced in 2021.

Hyundai Motor, communicating with global customers.

The first task upon starting the project was to collect internal interviews by country and conduct a Gap analysis of competitors, aiming to objectively evaluate the CX/UX level of Hyundai.com. This allowed us to understand the expectations of dealers and customers, as well as gain insights into Hyundai Motor’s next-generation business. Of course, it was also crucial to consider the anticipated changes in customer experience patterns after Covid-19.

01. Pandemic and Digital Experience

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 had a significant impact on the field of Customer Digital Experience (CXD), especially in the automotive and mobility sectors. The communication methods between customers and dealers shifted more towards online digital services. Providing more sophisticated and well-designed customer experiences became a crucial measure of competitive advantage in the market.

<Figure: 2020 Vehicle Purchase Customer Trend – J.D Power, Capgemini>

Due to the pandemic, customers have perceived private vehicles as safer, leading to an increase in vehicle purchase intent and limited opportunities for direct visits to stores. This has highlighted the importance of customers’ digital experiences in the omni-channel customer journey, where online exploration leads to offline store visits. Both competitors and Hyundai Motor have been prompted to actively introduce low-touch interaction services.

Consequently, we focused on designing services involving technologies such as VR, Video Chat, and 3D View to directly impact the purchase conversion and expand globally.

02. Requirements and Challenges

Gathering requirements and understanding the current status for the CX/UX redesign of Hyundai.com is a key step for all project participants to establish future work plans and clearly understand project goals.

Saltcake’s CX/UX consultants and UX designers systematically collected market-specific requirements and assessed the current status using specialized methodologies tailored to four main themes. They were also able to establish 12 challenges for the user interface (Front-End) based on the analysis of data collected by Hyundai Motor and Saltcake.

<Figure: Hyundai.com Methodology for collecting requirements and assessing the current status of global website re-design>

CX for You, UX for All

To address these diverse challenges, we have set “CX for you, UX for all” as the core goal of the project, advocating for tailored CX and consistent UX. While this may seem like a natural objective, we have continuously evaluated all tasks throughout the project to ensure they align with this fundamental goal.

We have defined four criteria that influence the types of customers interacting with Hyundai, from both behavioral and marketing perspectives.

• Personal Characteristics & Lifestyle
: Age and life cycle, purchase motivations, environmental consciousness, technological interests, accessibility to charging infrastructure
• Brand Perception
: Brand perception, brand loyalty, brand switching likelihood, level of interest in the brand
• Purchase-Related Factors
: Purchase budget, price sensitivity, purchase replacement cycle, purchase scale
• Service & Experience
: Past service experience and satisfaction, intention for additional purchases

These segment identification criteria help comprehensively understand customer needs and preferences, enabling the provision of tailored customer services. For example, customers who are price-sensitive and show high interest in environmental consciousness and Hyundai’s EV brand technology could be classified as customers with a high likelihood of considering EV purchases. For these customers, comparing the operational economy of electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles, while offering various EV purchase incentives, could encourage purchase conversion.

Hyundai.com’s personalized customer journey is structured into different stages, each requiring distinct services and content. As a result, customer-centric services can be seamlessly provided across the entire website.

Hyundai Motor’s UX Strategy for designing conversation with customers

We defined the necessary content and services for various customer segments for each journey of the CXJ. Then, we went through a process of deriving insights and gaining inspiration on what UX design could maximize customer experience through competitor analysis and exploration of best practices in other business domains.

Additionally, considering country-specific requirements, legacy system status, scalability, and the characteristics of Adobe Experience Management (AEM), we proceeded with optimal UX design.

In this project, there are several emphasized UX design features.

01. Mobile First UX

For responsive websites, it’s common to initially design the UX based on the desktop platform for convenience, with additional mobile UI wireframes to address situations where mobile devices require different layouts or interactions. While this approach may superficially achieve a responsive website, it can lead to several issues.

• Consistent Experience: UI elements on PC often appear quite different on mobile, leading to persistent discomfort for users, especially since vertical scrolling is prioritized over horizontal scrolling on mobile.
• Accessibility: Improper content placement for mobile screen sizes can cause users to miss important features or find them difficult to use. For instance, buttons may be too small to tap accurately, or text may be too densely packed to read comfortably.
• SEO Optimization: With Google applying mobile-first indexing, the mobile user experience significantly impacts search engine results.

Starting UX design from a mobile perspective allows for natural identification and proactive mitigation of these issues from the outset.

02. Narrative Engagement

The most critical focus in UX design direction for each screen is the “Narrative Engagement Strategy,” aiming to gradually capture the customer’s interest in Hyundai’s story and foster a positive relationship. To achieve this, the flow of storytelling should naturally progress, enhancing customer immersion and ensuring a seamless UX that facilitates easy access to services and content, potentially leading to purchases.

The Narrative Engagement Strategy is well reflected in the “customer journey-centric content structure” and the “delivery of brand messages centered around customer benefits.”

Firstly, the customer journey-centric content structure serves as the cornerstone of UX design direction on every page. It takes into account the visitor’s purpose for visiting the page, preferred services/content, and linkage to the next journey comprehensively.

<Figure: Customer Journey Centered Content Structure of ‘Product Detail Page’>

Furthermore, for customer-centric brand messaging, we have revamped the UX writing and product image strategy.

<Figure: Customer Benefit Centered UX Writing>

Innovation in Detail: Hyundai's UX Design

The Hyundai.com global website project is aimed at implementing Hyundai’s brand identity at the highest level. To achieve this, we meticulously adhere to the brand communication guidelines and collaborate closely with clients to conduct UX design. Additionally, we design UX components based on the Adobe Experience Management (AEM) platform, allowing various administrators in different countries to easily operate the website. This approach increases reusability and enhances customer immersion.

The overall UX design has been optimized for the purpose of pages or UI elements, considering factors such as RTL (Right to Left) support, multilingual support, and selective inclusion of services and content tailored to each country. This approach enables the Hyundai global website to flexibly address the diverse demands of various markets.

01. Start Page

Hyundai.com features several Start Pages, also known as the homepage and sub-homepages. These Start Pages assist customers in quickly grasping the services and content available and easily navigating to their desired pages. They include frequently accessed services tailored to each customer, user-friendly explanations, search functionality, and promotions, all aimed at maximizing the convenience of site usage.

02. Simulation

Regarding vehicle purchases, Hyundai.com goes beyond simple text and images by offering interactive features such as ‘Car Configuration’ and ‘Simulate Charging & Range’. These functionalities allow users to directly experience various purchasing scenarios. Through them, customers can explore vehicle options and calculate potential benefits of eco-friendly vehicles in real-time.

03. Request

Hyundai.com serves as a communication hub with customers by offering various inquiry services such as ‘Book a Test Drive’, ‘Request a Quote’, and ‘Book a Service’. These services facilitate intuitive understanding and use for users, enhancing usability through consistent UX design and improving conversion rates.

This UX design direction aims to strengthen Hyundai.com’s brand identity and prioritize providing a consistent experience optimized for global users.

04. Customized Service

Customers often find it challenging to remember various options when considering a purchase, even for the same vehicle model. Therefore, they desire the ability to save multiple decision scenarios. Additionally, they wish to have a centralized location to access services and usage history related to Hyundai, such as quotations, test drive reservations, service bookings, and direct inquiries. ‘My Hyundai’ serves as a platform for managing these records.

05. Navigation System

• GNB

Rather than adopting a GNB to structure the entire menu system, we opted for a strategy that involves prominently displaying the menu for the first stage of the customer experience journey, the ‘Exploration’ stage. Accordingly, we ensured that customers seeking vehicle exploration could easily access the ‘Cars’ menu for comprehensive vehicle browsing, while those interested in electric vehicles (EVs) could find the ‘Eco-friendly Cars’ menu. For existing Hyundai owners, we provided the ‘Support’ menu. This approach enables customers to experience an efficient customer journey by presenting relevant menu options upfront based on their needs and interests.

• Footer

In the footer, we also provide menu options tailored to different segments of customers, including first-time visitors to the Hyundai brand, customers considering electric vehicles (EVs), and existing Hyundai owners.

06. Accessibility & Convenience

The Hyundai global website includes various features to enhance the purchase conversion rate. These include the ‘Shop’ Sticky UI at the top of the product detail pages, where purchase-related menus are consolidated. Additionally, there is a Floating UI at the bottom of all pages for easy access to Live Chat, Live Showroom, and other services. Furthermore, a ‘Compare’ menu is provided for users to compare products.

Global Partner, Saltcake

The redesign of the Hyundai.com global website was a perfect project to leverage Saltcake’s expertise in experience consulting and human-centered design. This project, which required standardization of CX and UX across various countries, provided us with an opportunity to further enhance our capabilities. Moving forward, Saltcake will continue to fulfill its role as a consulting firm supporting domestic companies in successfully entering international markets.