📌 Project: Fiat USA – Car Configurator Redesign
👤 Role: Product Designer · UX Consultant
🏢 Company: 72andSunny (Global advertising agency) in partnership with Fiat
📆 Timeline: 2011
⚡ Focus: Automotive · Digital Retail · Consumer UX
🛠 Services: UI · UX · Product Localization
🎯 Impact: Redesigned Fiat’s European car configurator for the U.S. market, aligning user flows and compliance with American consumer expectations. Enhanced usability for vehicle selection, customization, and purchasing decisions. Delivered a localized, user-friendly experience that helped Fiat better engage U.S. customers while preserving the brand’s global identity.
Fiat aimed to attract a youthful market with their new compact cars. At the time, building a non-linear car configurator that allowed users to skip between different parts of the build process was uncommon. Often, selecting certain features required upgrading other parts of the car. To address this, I devised a user-friendly format with a progress bar at the bottom, an image on the left, and an action menu on the right. This quadrant-based layout made it easy for customers to navigate the UI quickly, without needing tooltips or coaching.
Images are crucial for capturing customers' interest. Detailed visuals of the car and its features effectively conveyed the site's narrative, allowing the story to unfold on its own.
Getting the configurator right required establishing standard process steps early on. The conditional logic had to be flexible while ensuring proper messaging to customers when features changed. Below is a snippet of the numerous wireframes needed followed by high-fidelity mockups to understand the process.
A case study can effectively illustrate the team's process, how research informs problem-solving, and how requirements adapt on the fly. It helps establish key takeaways from the project.
An example of this case study is shown below, or you can download the PDF.
