Experience Design Leader

Mazda · Build & Price

Simplifying a complex vehicle configuration experience, resulting in higher engagement and stronger purchase intent conversions.

 

Mazda · Build & Price

Simplifying a complex, multi-step vehicle configuration experience to improve clarity, confidence, and conversion.

 
 

Project at a Glance

  • My Role: Lead UX Product Designer, end-to-end design including research, design strategy, prototyping, testing, and cross-functional alignment.

  • Team: Product, engineering, analytics, and marketing

  • Goal: Increase engagement and conversions through improved clarity, confidence, and build completions across a complex, multi-step flow.

  • Outcomes: Increased engagement and build completion (+12%), drove higher conversion (+66% inventory views, +17% quote requests), and improved brand perception (+14%).

The Challenge

Mazda’s existing Build & Price tool was underperforming. Users struggled to explore vehicle customizations, understand how upgrades and features interacted, and did not progress to request a quote, view inventory, or contact a dealer. We redesigned the experience with the goal to improve user engagement, increase conversion rates, and raise customer satisfaction.

 
 
 
 

Research

  • Analyzed site analytics to identify drop-off points, revealing that users most frequently abandoned during early configuration steps. This helped us realize that we needed to display feature upgrades, inventory, and pricing earlier in the process.

  • Conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing experience, uncovering usability gaps and missed upgrade opportunities caused by unclear feature hierarchy and insufficient details at key decision points.

 
 

  • Reviewed competitor experiences, identifying effective patterns for progressive disclosure, comparison, and contextual guidance that helped users make confident decisions.

 
 
 

  • Mapped user journeys across the build flow, identifying friction and how pricing and configuration decisions affected user confidence and completion.

  • Conducted user testing on early concepts to validate assumptions, assess clarity, and inform interactions before moving into higher-fidelity designs.

Key Research Takeaways

  • Users need context around upgrades and the impact on pricing to instill confidence.

  • Complexity increased as builds progressed; not enough guidance and reinforcement led to hesitation and abandonment.

  • Surfacing trade-offs and selections persistently increased confidence to complete the build.

  • These insights informed a redesign focused on clarity, progressive disclosure, and confidence-building throughout the experience.

 
 
 
 

Iterative Design

  • Created interactive prototypes to explore alternative flows, feature groupings, and upgrades, allowing the team to test ideas quickly.

  • Tested concepts with users to evaluate ease of use, clarity around feature selection and upgrades, and overall confidence at key decision points.

  • Refined the experience across iterations by

    • Simplifying navigation and step progression

    • Making selections persistent and easily reviewable

    • Enhancing visual feedback to clarify upgrade value

    • Improving the visibility and timing of pricing and inventory

 

Through early prototypes, we tested key interactions and optimized the flow to create a seamless, flexible experience.

 

Impact

The redesigned Build & Price tool delivered measurable improvements

  • Improved Engagement — more time spent on the tool and a 12% increase in build completions  

  • Higher Conversion Rates — 66% increase in inventory views and 17% increase in quote requests after using the tool

  • Brand Satisfaction — 14% improvement in opinion of Mazda since launch

 
 
““The new build and price tool is fantastic and gives you a true sense of what it would be like to be sitting in the vehicle as your own.” ”
— User Feedback
 
 

Learnings

  • User engagement is driven by clarity and exploration — giving users freedom to explore, visualize upgrades and see how their choices impact price and inventory encourages deeper interaction.

  • Persistence and transparency matter — when users understand how the tool works, are alerted of ripple effects, and can navigate flexibly, drop-off decreases.

  • Competitor benchmarking is invaluable — by analyzing how rival brands implement similar tools we identified best practices and opportunity gaps.

  • Measure and iterate early and often — by prototyping early, testing and iterating we avoided major missteps and made improvements based on real user behavior, not just assumptions.

  • Qualitative feedback complements quantitative metrics — hearing what users feel about the tool helps capture brand and experience opportunities not visible in numbers alone.

 
Next — Johnson Outdoors