BMW Beyond The Drive

UI/UX  -  Branding  -  Desktop

With Beyond The Drive, I set out to design a system where new BMW owners could track the creation of their brand new vehicle through every step of its construction.

BMW faces a problem that many car companies and dealers face: when you've purchased your new car and you're sitting in the showroom, the last thing on your mind is extended warranties, protection plans, and the like; all you can think about is how excited you are for the day when your new car arrives. So when you're there talking to the sales rep, you may be a little less apt to retain all that extra information.
The solution? Design a system that keeps users excited over the weeks that they're waiting for their car while feeding them little breadcrumbs of information that they can absorb at their own pace.

Designing this system for BMW owners meant that I would need to make this feel exactly like it fit in with BMW's branding. This new portal experience needed to feel like it was pulled straight out of BMW's own website.
The branding for BMW is simple yet striking. The modest 3 column site design is bolstered by attractive photography and bold titles to create a feeling of elegant sophistication.

Beautiful. Bold. Exciting.

The final designs mimic the BMW branding to a T. This new system would be able to be dropped right into their existing site architecture.
This new section of the website would allow new BMW owners to sign in and track their new vehicle as it's built and shipped from Germany while also allowing them to sign up for additional warranty plans, BMW buyers cards, and the like.

If I were to do this again.

At some point in the future, I'd love to revisit this project and completely overhaul how the user is fed information about their vehicle that isn't very interesting to most people. I'd love to tackle the extended coverage and warranty plans to make them easy to understand for the user allowing them to make educated decisions on what types of coverage they want for their new vehicle.

Valuable Takeaway.

I think the most valuable lesson learned from this was how to take apart and analyze just what a brand is made up of. Being able to take apart and reassemble a brand identity into something new that still fits with the original was a really rewarding feeling.