Honda actually used two distinct web sites to sell its cars to America. While automobiles.honda.com is considered the primary customer-facing platform, the secondary platform, known as Shop Honda, served a site dedicated to lower-funnel users who responded to paid media. For years this solution had been in place, and while it presented some issues, it ultimately worked fine...until it didnt.
When it came time to redesign the main site, problems arose. Users being funneled through the ShopHonda site would no longer have a seamless experience - ending up on newly designed pages halfway through a flow, with no context, and would have no idea where they were or why this was happening.
NOT a good user experience. There were further backend complications which helped drive the point home that, having two sites that accomplished the same goal was not only redundant and unnecessary, but incredibly confusing for shoppers.
Unfortunately this Shop Honda site was still live and serving customers with an over 10 year old design and an even older platform. The team was initially tasked with redesigning the shop honda platform to modernize it and to align it with the new design of the autos platform - while still keeping it as a fully separate entity. At the time, there was no directive to merge the sites.
The team was exasperated. The further we dug into conflicting user flows, the more complicated and broken things became. It was very obvious what needed to be done, but no one actually tried to do it. At least not until I sat down with Product and Engineering, we locked ourselves in a room for a few hours and we hashed it out.
We decided to kill off the Shop Honda site entirely and fold its functionality into the Autos site. We did this by utilizing personalization technology that existed on the autos platform. Now, instead of an entirely separate flow on a separate platform, a Shop Honda user, coming from paid media, is served up a customized set of components tailored specifically to them that maintains the Shop Honda experience.
This was a surprise solution for the client, who was ultimately thrilled. The Shop Honda site had been an albatross for years that no one knew how to solve, and all it took was a small cross-functional team that was given the time to sit in a room, collaborate, and come up with a solve.
