Volvo Penta
Redesigning and evolving Volvopenta.com, for a diverse audience and a moving market.
In 2021 I joined a team to redesign Volvopenta.com, with a new premium aesthetic, solutions that would better serve their diverse user groups, and a flexible foundation that can keep up with an innovative company in a shifting market. I ended up staying on for four years, and this is where I grew into a senior designer, and from owning the UI to owning the whole design surface as I eventually took over the responsibilities of the UX designer I first collaborated with.
What made it interesting
The most interesting part of this collaboration wasn’t the design itself. It was everything around it, working out what we actually need and making sure it gets built across a lot of moving parts.
- Visions before briefs
- The work rarely started with a locked brief, instead it could start with everything from a vague need to a strong vision. I would interpret it and figure out what type of solution or action we actually needed. Sometimes the next step was a workshop, sometimes quickly exploring wildly different concepts, and sometimes we jumped on a call and went with our first instinct.
- Embracing change
- Volvo Penta is innovative and their market keeps moving, which means their offer constantly evolves and priorities shift. I enjoyed the challenge of this and decided to work with it instead of against it, adapting everything from my own process to the final UI, in such a way that it would survive some changes along the way.
- Orchestrating the work
- Once I got used to the understated design language, crafting the UI screens was the easy part. Coordinating the work and delivery on a sometimes short timeline was the hard (and fun) part – working closely with our PM, engineers, copywriters, stakeholders and SEO to keep everything aligned and sequenced nicely.
- Two very different user groups
- Volvo Penta has two very different customer segments: industrial and marine. This introduced a hard question in all of my work: do we marry the two into the same solution, or deliberately let them diverge, and how do we allow that divergence without the design system and CMS exploding into infinite variants?