Andrew McClellan

With support for the current platform expiring, Ford was looking to use the opportunity to embark on a digital transformation journey, re-designing and re-platforming their FMC Dealer portal. Ford approached the transformation with goals to maintain dealer communication efficiency, improve platform stability, streamline their content management and address technology support.

By collaborating with users and the client’s product team, we were able to understand the current state of the experience, and establish a foundation for Ford’s goals and objectives. Additionally, we evaluated the content in it’s current form and developed a content strategy framework within the new environment. To help define the experience strategy, we combined contextual onsite dealer visits and quantitative online surveys to provide insights into the user needs, behaviors and audiences preferences. 

After prioritizing these findings, we developed the initial recommendations for the future state experience of the portal, charting a path to deliver a best in class customer experience for their users - grounded in design principles supporting the needs of the users, and improving Ford’s FMC Dealer experience. Equipped with an experience strategy, and correlating digital transformation roadmap, we established a personalization strategy for FMC Dealer’s 5 user profiles and 9 subsequent audiences. 

During the pursuit process, I developed the creative vision for the digital transformation. After being awarded the project, I helped establish a shared vision of the transformation to ensure alignment across agency and client teams throughout production. I also directed the content strategy, user experience, and design teams by leading discovery sessions, user research methods, content planning and design exercises. I also helped manage the development integration with creative to establish the technical architecture and platform readiness of the dealer portal. 

Andrew McClellan
| Director of Brand Experience

Marti Gukeisen
| UX Director

MacKenzie DeWitt
| Senior UX Architect

Josh Keyes
| UX Architect

David Nonthaweth
| Associate Creative Director

Deana VanCura
| Content Strategist

Matt Kaminski
| Account Client Partner

We collaborated with Ford’s FMC Dealer team to better understand the existing dealer portal experience. Through 20+ workshop sessions with users, we established a shared vision for the future, focusing on 6 key experience areas: Branding, Content, Navigation, Analytics, Administration, and Support.

Using a bimodal research approach utilizing online surveys coupled with in-person dealer visits. We gathered information about how FMC Dealer users interact with the portal and what content matters most to them, while also identifying pain points. These methods allowed employees to provide valuable feedback (qualitative and quantitative) that was leveraged to improve the portal experience.

The content planning included an evaluation of FMC Dealer portal content - including an assessment reviewing page-level and messaging content, components, forms, pdfs and other content, formats and functions. Insights uncovered during this process also helped inform users needs for creating and publishing content, targeting users and understanding business rules.

A content strategy and framework is built from these learnings, and used as the foundation for the content management and personalization model. The personalization model was built to define how to deliver content based on identified user behaviors and preferences, as well as explicit selections. 

The FMC Dealer portal experience needed to integrate solutions capable of addressing the needs of numerous audiences. To do this, we established 7 design principles (Consistency, Simplicity, Efficiency, Relevancy, Fundability, Modularity, Reliability) for the experience.  

Each principle is designed to improve engagement, tool functionality and usage, and enable users to access information easier - ultimately improving user satisfaction, and allowing them to do their jobs more effectively.