Lexus Australia
National website and Encore app
'Making luxury personal' via the Lexus Encore app to inspire an effortless online experience
LEXUS AUSTRALIA, 2022
USER RESEARCH
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
UI/UX
DESIGN SYSTEM
DESIGN TOKENS
BACKGROUND
In the spirit of 'Omotenashi' - to wholeheartedly look after guests, Lexus prides itself on elevating itself beyond a luxury car brand to instead become a global luxury lifestyle brand.
To deliver on their ‘Omotenashi’ offering, Lexus created a central hub for their members and owners in the Encore App. Its purpose - to become a central and ongoing touchpoint for their customers needs spanning from servicing to promotional offers and experiences.
PROBLEM
For this reason the user experience of the Encore app needed to align with and deliver on the prestige of the Lexus brand offering - a proposition they weren’t currently fulfilling.
ASK
Elevate the ease of access, awareness and value the Encore app was able to deliver for prospective and current customers.
As Design Lead my challenge was two-fold:
1. Redesign the Encore app to better deliver on Lexus’ mission of ‘making luxury personal’
2. Elevate the wider touch-points of the Lexus digital experience for prospective and current owners via a centralised design system.
RESEARCH & REFRAME
At the outset, we conducted customer and business stakeholder interviews to better understand the needs, wants, and pain points of our customers.
These research findings helped us to better understand and explore how each of our audience groups defined ‘luxury’ in order for us to better deliver on their expectations, and their relationship with our currently app and website.
Unfortunately, their feedback was far from luxurious. The existing national website was complex, difficult to navigate and counterintuitive for users.
Customers were unable to identify or interact with Lexus’ premium product service – the Encore app with a large number of customers being unable to locate login screen.
We reframed the challenge. In order to provide our customers with a premium experience they first needed to be able to access it. Our definition of a luxury experience then became one of effortless ease - our new goal.
Initial goal: Access, awareness and value
Revised goal: Ease of access
PROJECT
A centralised design team was established to ensure a consistent user experience between the Encore app and website.
Our team goal was to improve both the consistency and speed of development across multiple workload streams.
Using Figma plugin 'Token Studio'* we created the ‘LexusKit Token Library’ and were able to use design tokens throughout the project.
My key role was to bridge the gap between our token SMEs and the wider design and development team.
I gathered cross-discipline insights and documented the process thoroughly, establishing best practices, problem solving, and implementing efficiencies not only for the design team but wider stakeholder groups and business units.
*Prior to the launch of Figma variables.
OUTCOME
The new design system, token library and Encore app design simplified the user experience for customers resulting in a 70% increase in the Encore app logins, and simplified workflow for the internal Lexus design team inspiring an internal lift to deliver on their company proposition of personal luxury.
With an established, scalable, organised and defined system the internal Lexus design team are now empowered to make their own refinement and improvements beyond the scope of the project.
