MBUSA Pride Page
Redesign MBUSA’s evergreen Pride page to simultaneously drive business and demonstrate a genuine commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Role: UX Designer and Content Strategist
Team: 1 pm, 1 visual designer, 1 copy writer, 2 UX Designers
Tools: Figma and AEM
My contributions
Evaluated MBUSA's Pride page from the previous year and conducted a competitive analysis to evaluate other company's Pride pages.
Collected educational materials on LGBTQIA+ topics.
Designed wireframe and built the page on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).
In June 2021, my team and I were tasked with creating a landing page for Safe Spaces, Mercedes’ Pride month campaign. We engaged in forward thinking dialogue about ways to integrate the specific campaign activation of Safe Spaces, in addition to strategizing on how the website can support the LGBTQIA+ community outside of the campaign.
Context
The Challenge
Mercedes Benz is a historically risk adverse company with an average customer age of 55. Our challenge was how might we provide users with an inclusive experience that takes a bold stance, shows a bigger commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and reaches a younger, more diverse audience through MBUSA digital platform.
The Process
With the phenomenon of rainbow-washing (defined here) abundant during pride month, my team and I wanted to investigate how our landing page could actually advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. We began by evaluating the Pride page from the previous year (linked here). Our main question here was: How does Mercedes show an authentic commitment to Pride month? We found, however, that the original Pride page does not show an authentic commitment to Pride month. Instead, it emphasizes ownership and marketing vehicles to viewers with copy such as “A Proud Owner Speaks” and “Our Mercedes Benz Family.”
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Wrap-up
Next, we analyzed various Pride pages to see how others (Uber, IBM, Girlfriend Collective) are engaging with the challenge of creating pages that genuinely commit to the LGBTQIA+ community. We found that these other companies created very engaging pages that transparently showed how they are actively helping the LGBTQIA+ community by promoting education and transparently displaying partnerships.
After our research, we found that we wanted to radically change the Mercedes Pride Page since the current page emphasizes owning a Mercedes-Benz vehicle rather than highlighting and embracing the LGBTQIA+ community.
Our goal became that our redesign needed to have a high level focus on transparency, commitment and education.
As a content strategist for this project as well, we had to map our research findings to content modules in AEM.
I then created a low-fidelity wireframes using the AEM modules and shared them for critiques with my team.
Additionally, I assembled four educational resources to include on the page for the team to review.
Final Design
This project is currently live on mbusa.com and can be found here. We accomplished high user engagement on the site in which users spent about 6 minutes on the page by creating a meaningful, engaging experience. Special thanks to my team for their support. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out!