Volvo Cars
Dealer Development Platform
Redesigning the platform that ensures all Volvo Cars dealers meet brand standards across facilities, customer experience, and service delivery, and much more.
Main goals
→ Create a well-aligned brand experience by redesigning the core platform to meet the quality for layout, user experience and visual design from the new design system framework
→ Improve DDP Standards platform based on feedback and UX audits to better structure and arrange the service to support the business need of higher compliance levels
Client
Volvo Cars
Project type
Service design, UX Design, Digital design
My role
Design Lead, Digital designer and mentor
Main activities
Heuristic UX review, Stakeholder interviews, quantitative research (web survey), design concept and final design delivery in Figma
Deliverables
Checkpoints for every phase. Design project plan, research insights, business and user needs, design delivery, final presentation for stakeholders, hand-over to development team, design QA
✅
Compliance levels
Increase compliance level for Volvo Cars dealerships
🎨
Brand alignment
Ensure Volvo brand alignment and expression
🔍
Findability
Increase findability and make delaers more effecient
⤵️
Save time
Decrease time spent on support dealers using DDP
The challenge
Volvo Cars needed a modern platform to ensure consistent brand standards across their global dealer network. The existing Dealer Development Platform was outdated and made it difficult for dealers to understand and implement requirements around facilities, brand alignment, customer service, and aftermarket care.
The challenge was to redesign the platform to make compliance straightforward and engaging, increase the compliance levels, while supporting dealers in delivering the premium Volvo experience that customers expect – from showroom design to service delivery and everything in between.
Project plan
Understand what DDP Standards is and how the content and structure are arranged. Make a holistic overview of the current system Identify what components and design layouts we can use for the DDP content Get information about the new design and guidelines (or at least find someone that have the information) Interviews with stakeholders and web survey on the current site Create a basic wireframes, layout and content structure Visual design and delivery
Research approach
We started by interviewing dealers, regional managers, and Volvo's brand and retail teams to understand the full scope of dealer requirements and pain points with the existing platform. This research revealed that dealers needed clearer guidance and more practical tools to implement Volvo's standards.
Working closely with stakeholders across retail operations, brand management, and after-sales, we developed a user-centered platform that made compliance requirements accessible and actionable. The focus was on creating an experience that supported dealers in delivering excellence rather than just checking boxes.
Key insights
Findability
→ Dealers frequently asked for information and where to find it. This is time consuming for both the Volvo personell as well as the dealerships. Making content easier to find and understand how to ensure compliance was a big opportunity.
→ The search function on the legacy platform did not work well. An improved search function would help dealers find the right information by themself as well as in a more streamlined and search driven function.
Improved content for higher compliance
→ A lot of the content on the site was hard to find and the related documents was not easily discovered. This contributes to unnecessary long sessions and low alignment.
→
Dependency on Volvo personell
→ Research also discovered that a high depency on some key persons in the Volvo organisation to support dealer with the right information. Volvo stakeholders report that they constantly get questions about latest standards as well where to find the right content.
Main delivery presentation
The insight work was presented separately but an overall summary
for high level stakeholders was packaged to get up to date on the main findings
Driving impact for dealer standards
"
The redesigned Dealer Development Platform make it significantly easier for dealers to understand and implement Volvo's standards. Dealers reports increased clarity around requirements and greater confidence in delivering the premium Volvo experience across all customer touchpoints. The platform helps Volvo ensure brand consistency across Volvo's global dealer network while supporting dealers in providing the high-quality facilities, customer service, and aftersales care that define the Volvo brand.
"
Main strategic outcomes
Brand alignment
→ 100% consistent with Volvo Cars components and guidelines
→ Reduced dark design / UX patterns
→ Shortened onboarding time to “understand” the UX of the system
→ Increased the overall customer satisfaction
Improved content structure
→ Content structure improved to meet user and business demands better
→ Shortened time to navigate and find the intended content
→ Reduced time spent to scan and find relevant content
→ Reduced time for educating and guiding users
Improved data structure
→ Data structure improvements to improve user search to find the right content
→ Shortened time to find the right content
→ Reduced amount of unrelated content and material
→ Decreased time spent on manual work from the Volvo business
Automatic updates and notifications
→ Improved statuses (and notifications) on all content and compliance levels
→ Reduced time spent for finding updated or new content
→ Removed the need to manually check for changes
→ Reduced time spent to update users on important changes
Key learnings
This project reinforced the importance of designing for diverse user needs. Dealers operate in different markets with varying resources and challenges, so the platform needed to be flexible enough to accommodate these differences while maintaining consistent brand standards.
Working across the entire dealer ecosystem - from facilities and brand alignment to customer service and aftersales - taught me the value of taking a holistic approach to experience design. Every touchpoint matters in delivering a premium brand experience, and they all need to work together seamlessly.
Design delivery
Solution and design delivery
The final design delivery concludes all key views and elements to be abler to create all necessary views, funtionalities and features as well as all site pages. The design delivery and handover was setup and handshaked with development team before closing the strategic redesign phase of the project.
