CHALLENGE
Once a brand defined by its rebellious fans, by 2019, the chrome had lost its sheen. Our challenge was to re-platform and revamp its business to be digital-first and appeal to new riders or be left in the dust.

OPPORTUNITY
Reshape an iconic American company into something serving the 21st century, through refined design and unified experience that serves the customer and the business.

SOLUTION
A singular destination that balances Harley’s rich lifestyle with a future facing platform for merchandising and selling bikes, parts, and clothing.

I started working on Harley Davidson during the pitch where the requirement to win was clear: make the Harley experience and brand coherent to the customer.

We did just that, and after winning the pitch the team jumped right in with a round of discovery research. This included, stakeholder interviews, site audits, user interviews, site analytics, surveys, and competitive audits. The goal was to understand and wrangle the tangled mess that was the Harley ecosystem and also what were our opportunities to create an exceptional experience.

Working directly with strategists and researchers I compiled our research into artifacts that were used to present back to the client and then to kick off the broader team internally. These included, pain point insights, personas, persona specific journeys, competitive analysis, interview hot sheets.

Following discovery, the team set about defining a vision, experience strategy, and architecture for the site. At this point I was the solo lead designer working with the head of design and my peer from the brand design team to define the experience in broad strokes.

This phase included finding strategic opportunities within the journey to improve Harley’s CX, identifying and designing key flows integrating new backend API’s, and defining a new architecture that combines the entire Harley experience into one product.

Due to the complexity of combining Harley’s ecosystem into one product and with little consumer data to suggest how to structure it, we quickly realized we needed to test and validate any architecture solutions.

I worked directly with researchers to design two architectures that solved the problem in different ways. We used multiple rounds of qualitative card sorting exercises before developing a low fidelity prototype to test with our target audience.

Part of a larger brand redesign, the website was the place where the new design system could really come to life. Built on three fundamental principles of visual organization, all of Harley’s brand touchpoints could be unified.

Everything came down to a matter of HORIZON, BALANCE, and PERSPECTIVE.

This simple philosophy came from understanding our personas’ needs. Riding a Harley is the juxtaposition between thrill and calm, loud and quiet, peace and anger. Our design system reflects this tension through vignettes of images, textures, type, and iconography.

Following the definition and vision phases we kicked off the larger team sprints. During this phase I was the e-comm lead with a team of 1 junior UX designer, and 2 UI / brand designers. Our team structure was very flat, with all of us working across disciplines.

Each sprint was 3 weeks long with the first week being devoted to wireframing. I was able to quickly iterate templates and components working primarily with the junior UX designer. At the end of the first week, we presented our wires to the client for directional approval.

In parallel with wireframing the sprint team was exploring different UI directions. The first week of the 3 week sprint would be used to push the limits of UI and interaction design with freewheeling collaborative sessions.

Working with the UI designers I pushed the team to try many different iterations and contributing high fidelity designs of my own.

By week three the entire team would be focused on turning our templates into components and systematizing the designs. This third week involved the creation of many high-fidelity prototypes to refine the interactions and communicate our intent to the developers.

Our approval from client stakeholders for each sprint would come 2 days before the sprint concluded. The last two days were devoted to sprint wrap up. This included a burndown where any features not completed, or feedback not included was added to the backlog. As well as file publishing to a shared Zeplin with our Accenture development team.

I made the case early in sprint planning to leverage Zeplin’s automatic annotation features and easy sketch plugin to streamline the spec writing process.

56%

Increase in conversion

74%

More revenue per site visitor

100secs

More time spent on site

9%

Decrease in bounce rate


CROSS COMPANY COLLABORATION
Harley was the first project won and delivered by both Droga5 and Accenture Interactive (now Accenture Song). My role, in addition to designing, was to manage the cross-company ecommerce teams. The result was the successful transition between platforms and an on-time delivery.