GENERAL MOTORS
The Crux
GM's current corporate brand experiences come across as anachronistic and banal, especially in light of the company's current attempt to pivot towards being a supposedly innovative, technologically advanced company. With its bland, insipid art direction, incomprehensible design patterns, nap-inducing content, and nonsensical information architecture, gm.com feels years behind both creatively and functionally as a purported tech-forward brand's experience.
Ultimately, GM is the world's most historically prolific automobile company. It is an industry-leading pioneer that has made, is making, and will keep making groundbreaking automobiles. Let's make it clear and obvious that is what GM is, rather than the generic pharmaceutical manufacturer currently masquerading as the company.
Some key screens from the current gm.com experience.
The Intent
To assist ourselves in determining just what it is we're trying to accomplish, first we ask ourselves questions pertinent to our skillsets and how they can positively affect GM's design needs.
1: Does the design quality of a brand’s interfaces has an impact on users’ perceptions of the quality of its software?
2: Is General Motors perceived by the public at large as an innovative, industry-leading digital technology benchmark?
3: Do GM’s current interfaces authentically reflect the design abilities of a supposed industry software leader?
These may be largely rhetorical questions, but they are central to the intent of GM's current product aims, and are the types of questions few within the company seem to be bothered to ask. Ultimately, in this age of cord cutting and social media, the core tenet of modern digital-first design is one legacy automotive companies, GM perhaps more so than anyone else, have yet to realize–the interface is the brand, rather than the irrelevant legacy marketing of the past.
Strategic Actions
We’re going to begin this design-led exercise by designing, rather than having endless performative meetings arranging irrelevant frippery on a Miro board, or waiting for months so a bunch of "UX designers" who have never actually designed a thing in their lives can move around some blank gray boxes.
In what is essentially an anti-design design organization, this wide-ranging, silo-busting exercise will require strict definition and guidance, and that requires tangible specificity. It is upon this foundational intent that we will form multiple creative directions expressing unique, disparate paths for the GM brand through fully realized interface design examples, providing evidence of the potential of a GM brand based upon interface-led design and content.
Direction A:
Purpose
Why do we do this?
We do this because we can’t help it. We’ve had a deep, burning desire to define and form the future of transportation as long as we can remember. We want to create things that advance the human race forwards. We have had this desire motivating us for over a century, and it will keep doing so for the rest of our futures.
This direction emphasizes the purpose that drives GM as a company. It features big, bold, reinforcing messaging, highlights futuristic concepts, and takes inspiration from GM's history as a company built on lofty ideas.
By emphasizing this history as a long-time industry innovating benchmark, we infuse historic gravitas into the messaging—when GM says it is inspired to shape the future of transportation, these are not hollow words.
Direction B:
Product
What do we make?
We make vehicles that will define the future of transportation. We have been driven by our designers and engineers to create the design-led, technology-led future of mobility. We are defined by what we create, and we make groundbreaking, culturally significant cars and trucks, because why else would we want to do this?
This company makes automobiles of all kinds—work trucks, luxury SUVs, sports cars, race cars, etc—and they are what we champion. The messaging is about GM's products, and not random nebulous, irrelevant PR initiatives.
Here, the content leads by highlighting and elevating the consistently new products GM develops. New product launches are prioritized, with news and information about other vehicles and their brands also prominently featured.
Direction C:
Expertise
What are we skilled at?
We are pioneers in all aspects of creating automobiles—design, engineering, and production. Our teams are constantly innovating in all fields of transportation, and we’re planning on doing even more of it in the years ahead. If you want to be an innovator in the future of human mobility, you’ll want to do it with us.
In this direction, we champion the skills and talents of GM. This company is where some of the most creative, forward-thinking designers and engineers in the industry are working to develop the future of automobiles.
GM's considerable capabilities in design, engineering, and manufacturing are all prominently highlighted, providing a platform for the company's talent to express themselves, with the added intent of appealing to future GM talent.
Realization
After creating our three prospective design directions based on three disparate content strategies aligned with GM’s future-forward, industry pushing ethos, we build upon the insights discovered in these initial creative explorations. By coalescing and distilling our multiple previous executional ideas into one simple, scalable, and flexible design direction, we form a vision that can function as a foundational MVP for the new interface-led GM brand's future.
After extracting design elements from the previous creative explorations to expand upon, now the same exercise is performed with the content. Here, we create real examples of how we can visually leverage GM's prolific content.
With a new, vastly simplified taxonomical structure, content strategy, and visual design, our MVP provides a tangible proof of concept for how the future of the GM brand doesn't have to perpetually be 10 years in design debt.
The way GM's internal brand and experience design teams operate, sheer compilation of countless design elements is regarded as simplification. Of course, this functionally only results in causing more design debt, as the various silos create their own additions to the design system, like a never ending centipede of typography styles, buttons, colors, menus, et al. Instead, we distill the interface into as few disparate elements as possible, minimizing the possibilities of identity deviation on a micro scale, but allowing wide room for unique content and platform-specific interface design creativity on a macro scale.
gm.com landing before and after
News
As the primary driver of traffic to this platform, we aim to provide our News content the more contemporary, user friendly, less arcane experience it deserves. To provide a more usable digital newsroom experience, we have developed a new system of content classification to aid our users in discovering and exploring our copious amounts of content.
About GM
What is GM about? General Motors is about automobiles, and the work that goes into creating them. The new About GM section acts as a vessel for users to discover content related to those automobiles and processes behind them, rather than the sanctimonious virtue signaling content plaguing the current experience.
History
GM has more history as an automaker than any other on the planet. We want to leverage this into immersive, dynamic content emphasizing the disruptive ways the company has changed the industry over the past century-plus. By creating a story based on some of GM's past product milestones, we are essentially guiding users through the history of the American automobile.
Design
General Motors literally invented the car design studio. They have an incredible bounty of endemic, visually compelling content from the past, present, and future related to GM's design studios to utilize. Here, we actually utilize it, and provide GM's talented automotive designers a platform to spread their knowledge and insights.