Jeep® Badge of Honor is a brand engagement platform for enthusiasts of off-roading adventures. The product helps with discovering new trails and engaging Jeep owners in a growing community. Currently, the app has over 17k ratings with an average rating of 4.8 and 22k active monthly users. It allows for brand engagement in the form of gamification and ordering hard badges to be displayed on one's vehicle. The tangible element of the experience connects to the real-life off-roading adventure and drives excitement among Jeep owners.
This product was developed several years ago and was built without an established design system in place.
Problem:
• Lack of cohesion and inconsistent experience throughout the product make it look chaotic and dated.
• Some tasks were not intuitive to complete.
For this project, we implemented a design system that’s scalable, elegant, and accessible. The most challenging part was the detailed focus on how each new component I design can be scaled in the future.
Solution:
• Introduce consistency between the visual elements.
• Create clear direction for scaling the product.
• Improve usability and brand perception.
• Minimize the design debt.
My focus was on building and maintaining the new design system, creating a consistent set of components and pages, improving the flows, and improving the overall experience.
When I joined the Badge of Honor, the basis of the design system were established. I worked on redesigning pages and components by using the existing system elements and adding new ones. All stages of ideation required keeping design heuristics front of mind. On top of that, I focused on presenting the information needed for the user in a way that brings them the most value from perusing each page. Below are the main principles I was always mindful of during ideation.
Knowing the answers to these and more questions allowed me to successfully approach the redesign of each component with empathy. Each exploration process gave a start to multiple versions and iterations that were validated with the team and selected for the final implementation. For each component, my goal was to create at least several ways to present the information and create a new pattern that can be scaled later whenever needed. Each ideation session was validated by team review and feedback.
I tried to keep the flows simple with a touch of fun, without any overwhelming elements or steps, yet still allowing the users to accomplish tasks such as checking into the trails or ordering hard badges.
A big part of working on this project was its iterative environment and constant evolution. Throughout the time on the project, I worked on improvements such as:
• Promotional updates and reminders, i.e. the hard badge order reminder.
• Improving the badge request flow via microcopy updates, from "Check-in" to "Earn Badge", to improve the discoverability of the full product experience.
• Indigenous land information - corresponding to each trail.
One of our goals was to make it super easy for users to navigate the physical badge ordering process. We improved the process of checking into trails and badge order process to make them more intuitive.
This project was a great opportunity to flex creative muscle and get into the heads of the users of such an adventurous and fun brand, especially since the feedback for the new features was constantlybeing gathered from existing users. Below is a quick summary of a final impact:
Improvements:
What would I do differently?
If I had any impact on the resource allocation, I would advocate for testing the product with the actual users to validate if our new flows are intuitive and discoverable. The design decisions were based on the SME's input, who validated which solution will be the most successful.
This is one of my favorite projects that I've gotten to work on, as Jeep is such an iconic brand with exciting traditions. As it’s an already existing app with over 22k monthly users with an average rating of 4.8 and an established base of users, it was a pleasure to help improve the experience for so many people in terms of enjoyability, cohesiveness, and information layout.