Revolutionizing the Customer Journey for a Leading Tire Retailer

Introduction

As the largest independent tire retailer in the US, our client boasted a rich history of customer loyalty. However, their success rested on an outdated, store-centric model, prompting a 52-week collaboration with frog Design to usher in a digital era.

This 28-week design sprint defined the MVP future state of the Customer and Associate experiences. I led the Visual Design, Illustration, and Communication Design efforts in a dynamic team of specialists.

Key Assets

  • Future State Experience Maps

    Visual storytelling of the solution, tracing step-by-step journeys of customers and employees.

  • Service Blueprints

    Detailed diagrams considering dependencies and requirements for the future customer and employee journey.

  • Custom Illustration System

    Crafted to tell engaging stories and invoke empathy for customers and associates.

  • Program Style Guide

    A cohesive visual treatment encompassing color, typography, personas, iconography, and illustrations.

As generations and automotive market forces shift, customers are now demanding a new service paradigm - one that centers around digital sales.

The client has cultivated a loyal customer base through product value and a high standard of service since its beginning in 1960. With a strong internal culture, the company’s employees embody the founder’s philosophy to “treat people fairly and to just be nice.” Our client needed to grow out of an outdated, siloed, store-driven experience built for previous generations.

The frog team acted as a “special forces” team for the client CXO to codify several ambitious and pragmatic future state experiences and activate them through cross-functional alignment within the organization.

We chose 8 user scenarios to translate into formal experience documentation.

Harnessing Atomic Design methods to construct complex documentation

Our team needed to deliver a collection of accurate, complex technical documentation with detailed illustrations - and fast. As the Visual Designer on the retainer, I looked to Atomic Design principles and designed a collection of nesting templates and components that combine to create detailed experience narratives and experience blueprints.

In this way, we were able to quickly and accurately craft each document to cater to the specific needs of the audience and the experience it portrays.

Visual harmony through a Documentation Style Guide

To convey the connection points between initiatives, we created a cohesive visual treatment that included many different complex elements: color usage, typography, personas, iconography, and illustrations.


These guidelines can be used for reference when building out any deliverable for the client. In addition to guidance, this guide includes resources to help future designers execute their vision, and it includes assets that non-designers can copy/paste from the deck to use right away.

Life in an omnichannel world

Our customer journeys span physical and virtual spaces, and part of the fun of designing across channels is figuring out how these experiences can all play well together. Illustration concepts existed in three main dimensions:

Physical

Current and future-state physical spaces and objects. This includes locations like store exteriors & service bays, and technical gear like handheld devices.

Virtual

Tech and ops processes and products, like service status messages, actions in the POS and the customer waiting list.

Experiential

Customer and Associate personas - specifically their daily lives and how their emotional states are impacted by the end-to-end experience.

Program Impact

8

Experience Narratives

2

Service Blueprints

785,000

estimated hours saved around on-site store efficiency

45+

Client Working Sessions

4

Client Workshops

$28.3M - $42.5 M

anticipated increase in annual website revenue