A quick overview

Mercedes Benz is the epitome of a luxurious car experience. As a new addition to the Mercedes Benz team at my Razorfish 2015 internship, I assisted in creating several designs for multiple projects across the brand.

skills: workshop design, customer journey map, card-sorting, sketching, wireframing, research, invision, sketch

ideation station: workshops and journey maps

Mercedes Benz successfully worked with Razorfish in 2010 to create a 5 year brief to launch their brand into the future. Crazily enough, they completed 90% of that roadmap that the agency provided. In 2015, it was time to take up the helm again and I was lucky to be part of this work. My co-workers and I prepared 2 workshops and attended several small group sessions to generate ideas and user journeys. Discussing these journeys—and subsequently the concepts attached to them—proved to be highly informative and helped set up the direction of the workshop/brief.

“ready to rock the car industry?” 

The first workshop I helped prepare was internal, featuring the participation of professionals across disciplines at Razorfish. We spent an entire day card-sorting, mind-mapping, and eagerly discussing how to make the commerce process more desirable for users.  As one of my co-workers joked before the meeting,”Ready to rock the car industry?”

The second workshop included the direct participation of the Mercedes Benz client representative. With the client’s perspective, we were able to determine what directions we should take the experience brief and our next ideation phase.

sketching bill buxton-style

Once the user journeys and the workshop gave us direction, the UX team and I had the fun opportunity to sketch…pretty much whatever we wanted. It was optimal opportunity to stretch as far as possible when conceptualizing the future of the automotive industry, so we spent many hours bouncing ideas back and forth in both individual and group sketching sessions.

The exercises that I used in these sessions became utilized in the Acura Intern project that I led at the end of the summer. I continue to use these tips & tricks to this day.

super filter

Filtering systems are a pain to research and design, and I’ll say rarely that e-commerce companies do it well. It’s a constant struggle between what the system’s backend can accomplish and sort while arguing for a better user experience. With new car models and add-ons, the previous MBenz filter was out-of-date and needed a boost. I created over 23 rough sketches and 30 wireframes with different proposals to make a better filter.

​In the end, some of my concepts and suggestions were taken into consideration! See the live filter here.