honda motorsports

Building a hub for racing fans

We were tasked with developing the new Honda Motorsports website, which would replace the current Honda Performance Development (HPD) site and the National Advertising Motorsports campaign marketing destination. This site needed to be the destination for all Honda Racing paid media efforts, multiple racing series display media, and social media efforts. Additionally, the site would include a new CMS, e-commerce experience, and Racing Line membership application process.

Challenge

Responsibilities

Concepting, Information Architecture, Wireframes

The original site was in dire need of a redesign. Multiple aspects of the site were broken, the site was not optimized for cross-device viewing and the existing editor lacked the flexibility it needed for quick updates made on-the-go.

old site

Process

As a small and agile team, we designed this site through a series of sprints. Collaborating closely with my art director, copywriter, developer and producer, I was able to work efficiently and effectively. We leaned on each other as soundboards as we worked through a topic we were growing in familiarity with. When someone on our core team had content to review, the other members on our team would suggest ideas that challenged, enhanced, or validated it. At the end of each sprint, our clients and stakeholders always expressed how impressed they were with the quality and quantity of work the team was able to produce in little time.

Sprinting to the End

Before any deliverables were created, our core team created three different concepts and high-level structures that the HPD site could evolve into. We wanted to give our clients an option early on to influence the site and feel more invested with what the team was building. This selected concept also painted a clear end goal for everyone working on the project–influencing all our decisions to bring us closer to the desired solution.

Initial Concepting

Before starting design, I drafted guiding principles that the team aligned with before proceeding in our build. We shared these with our clients and larger team to assure them that along every step of the way, these principles would drive decisions and keep us focused on meeting our goals.

Guiding principles

We created the site map to establish page hierarchy and keep us accountable of all the pages the redesigned site needed to include. This fairly complex site required us to divide page development into multiple sprints to work effectively and meet quick deadlines.

Site Map

WIreframe Development

The Honda Motorsports website is a card-based experience that lets users customize their view of the site content relevant to them–whether they’re Performance Motivated Buyers or Motorsports Enthusiasts. We designed the site to be visually-driven, accompanied by messaging that encourages exploration. On the homepage, I wanted users to be served everything from news and heritage to products, while selecting a filter serves only tagged content related to that topic.

Homepage

Individual racing series pages were created to keep content curated and centralized for Racing Enthusiasts or Performance Driven Buyers interested in specific series. Content that users could expect on each series include: upcoming races with the ability to ‘Add to Calendar,’ featured Honda drivers and bios, trackside galleries, race reports, and race vehicle specifications. I designed the site to be modular, so if a series didn’t have featured Honda drivers, that module would be disabled for that series.

Racing Series

The Street Vehicles page plays a huge factor in leveraging motorsports to influence the middle of the autos purchase funnel since we know consumers are drawn to attributes like fun-to-drive, sporty, and speed. With this in mind, we chose to feature specific production vehicles, some high-level specs and entry points to the vehicle landing pages to ultimately drive sales conversions.

STREET VEHICLES

Many of our users are unaware of Honda’s long history in the racing industry. In designing this page, we wanted to make it clear that racing has always been inseparable from Honda. This portion of the site gives users a chance to explore and discover the history and heritage of Honda racing through an animated timeline that highlights many victories and firsts of Honda throughout the decades.

ABOUT / HISTORY

The site leverages Honda’s participation in a breadth of motorsports to strengthen the Honda automobile brand, and ultimately increase sales. Today, the Honda Motorsports site is one destination that serves both HPD and American Honda’s marketing objectives.

The new Honda Motorsports site allows our clients to accomplish the same tasks as before, but frustration-free and quicker. Our clients are now able to update the latest race reports and news from any device while on the grounds of the race with ease—a capability they longed for in the previous iteration. HPD staff now spends less time manually taking Racing Line product orders via phone because the checkout process can be completed through the e-commerce section. Racing Line application processes are better for users because they can save their progress midway through the lengthy process. Overall, we increased efficiencies for the HPD team and allowed the publishers to publish content immediately after races conclude.