Accell Group
Our vision is to be the market leader in mid and high-end e-bikes and in bicycle parts and accessories in all our chosen regions, with consumer needs and corporate social responsibility at the heart of everything we do.
Accell group is a dutch holding with twenty biking brands. In 1937, they were already shining with motorised bikes, later they launched the first electric mountainbike with many innovations to come. Accell asked to create a stage for all associated brands and help them become a digital player in the mobility industry. With this huge project we helped Accell create a dynamic design system which enabled brands to build a website where they can tell their story and display their products.
My responsibilities
User research, card sorting, stakeholder management, market research, interaction design, workshop facilitating, briefing development
Deliverables
Concept, Persona’s, customer journey map, heatmap analyses, research report, wireframes, prototype, sitemap, flowchart
Challenge
Strengthen Accell as a digital player by creating a dynamic design system that serves all 20 brands in all countries to tell their story and display their products.
Approach
How to design 1 website for 8 brands in 12 countries? A website that is easy to set up, doesn’t require lots of code AND could be translated into unique brand experiences adapted to country specific standards.
We talked to all brands to find out which needs were similar and unique. There were enough similarities that formed a solid foundation all brands could profit from, a perfect case for a white labeled website.
Concept principles
Scalable
make use of out of the box features to accelerate the go live date and be able to scale up easily.
Characteristic
Make every brand stand out and translate their brand characteristics into a fabulous design
Measurable
Measure KPI’s from all brand, compare them with each other and use them to strengthen performance
Reusable
find the similarities between brands and their customer needs and create a component library to fully utilise them.
Solution
This projects strategy was to launch and scale fast. A solid foundation with a variety of building blocks that are measured from the get go.
Because of this approach and the website traffic we could learn and optimise as soon as the website was launched. Digital marketing played an important role setting up the KPI’s and Google Analytics.
The SXA toolbox that Sitecore provides has been a starting point for the solution, this helped to speed up in an early stage of the project
The following key elements for the solution helped us to build a website for multiple brands in multiple countries.
Unique brand experience
One important topic for stakeholders was to be able to expose their brands in a distinctive way. By making use of unique content, photography, colours and fonts brands were able to make an recognisable brand experience.
Component based design system
We created a global design system that functions as a base for all brands. Every brand can pick relevant components (features) and build their own experience.
Country specifics
Besides a unique brand experience, we included differences per country as well. For example, legal requirements and wording of the navigation. Especially content related differences are measured carefully to optimize along the way.
