Hitachi

Introducing businesses to the Hitachi European R&D Centre.

Website UX & UI

Task flows
Wireframes
UI design
Prototyping
User testing

Design lead

Results

86/100

4.8/5

Ease of use
Mobile usability

Hitachi is world-renowned for technological innovation

Overview

The European Research and Development (ERD) Centre has a unique research and design approach. It's based on collaboration, co-creation and innovation.

I led the UX and UI design for this project, which supports businesses in starting new projects with ERD and helps them to introduce new partners or colleagues to the centre.

The site scored highly during usability testing. It enables users to discover information easily and helps them to find the right contacts to initiate new projects.

Growing a community of engaged visitors

Challenge

The website needed to clearly explain the ERDs unique approach, the specialisms and the experience ERD, easy-to-understand way aimed at European Business Units, potential partners and clients. The ERD didn’t have a web presence of its own and the European presence on Hitachi’s global R&D site felt Japanese-centric.

Making technical and scientific information accessible for non-tech users

Goals

Build actionable relationships.

Meet marketing and sales KPIs.

Understanding the audience through research and analysis

Research

Website and content discovery work and strategy was carried out by an external digital agency and included reviews, audits, interviews and workshops. I had comprehensive insights and learnings from their work to draw on, including:

Personas - Business Units, Future Partners, B2B.

Content audit and strategy recommendations.

Initial site map and user flows.

Discover  >  Evaluate  >  Contact  >  Share

Site map with user flow for the ‘Business Unit’ Persona
1    They have an interest in Automotive innovation, they visit the homepage and navigate to ‘What we do’ looking for relevant information.   
2  They get a good overview of ERDs offering and are able to quickly navigate to a specific Automotive page
3    They read the about the breadth of Automotive experience and see a link to an Automotive case study.    
4     The user reads the Automotive case study and can navigate directly to a specific contact page and send an enquiry.
Wireframes, expanding on the user flow for the 'Business unit' persona. Ensuring each step to the goal was signposted and clear.

Exploring design directions

Design concepts

At first, Hitachi ERD was keen to explore a separate tone of voice and brand perception from the global corporate brand, that would target a specific audience of Business Units and European partners.

After some early conceptual work, it was decided that the design should be more in line with Hitachi’s brand guidelines, including the addition of the global Hitachi header that is implemented across the portfolio of standalone websites.

Visual design concepts

Innovating within the guidelines

Visual design

The creative concepts formed a starting point for the final design direction. I ensured they complied with Hitachi’s strict brand guidelines and appealed to the European business market and convey ERDs values of collaboration, co-creation and innovation. I created a library of components and styles to ensure consistency across the site.

Iterating and improving

Prototyping & testing

We ran a user test on a prototype I built with Invision. Several users struggled with the task of finding a ‘Big Data Analytics’ case study.
I addressed this feedback by improving the functionality, allowing users to filter by both sector and capability.

homevideofallback.png

Good responses and test scores

Results and user feedback

The final results of usability testing were positive and unusually, the group using mobile devices reported a higher satisfaction score than the desktop group.

Comments from the test group included: ‘informative’ ,‘eye-catching’ and ‘conveyed an air of confidence and innovation’.

Hitachi ERD were very pleased with the project and the results we delivered.

4.8/5

Average ease of use score

86/100

Mobile usability score

Next steps

Future

Given the opportunity to do further work on this project, I would have optimised the UX on an ongoing basis, conducting user testing and interviews and reviewing analytics data. I would have used an evidence-based approach to hypothesise and test further improvements to the site, to better meet our initial objectives of growing a community of engaged visitors and meeting marketing and sales KPIs .

Agency

Selesti

Tools

Sketch and Invision

Let’s work together