Toyota Racing
A Site that engages with Fans
Toyota Racing
A Site that engages with Fans
CHALLENGE
Dated site. Uninspired design. Limited content and functionality. No community.
How do you capture the excitement of a race and make it come alive, even for those fans who are not at the race?
INSIGHT
Racing Fans are a highly engaged audience. Fans love to talk, and share – being a part of the community is key to their experience.
Passionate, loyal fans need a place where they can come together to get the latest information about all things Toyota Racing, and to connect with fellow fans and their favorite drivers online.
IDEA
Re-imagine the Racing Site as the world's largest couch. Become the community where fans (and drivers) come together.
Build site as the ultimate one-stop destination for all Toyota Racing content, including proprietary ‘insider’ content
Give control back to the fans. Customized feeds allow fans to customize content and experience, based on their interest
Setup site to act as an online community. Use campaigns to drive traffic and engagement with fans.
- Build a responsive site that provides a unified experience, across all devices.
IMPACT
A Site that has become a benchmark for all Racing sites. A Site that acts as a call to all fans to join the conversation.
Programs like Tweet Race (and T-Shirt competition) encourage fan engagement. The Tweet Race was the first of it's kind virtual NASCAR race that encouraged fans to participate in the Chase for the 2013 championship by tweeting their favorite Toyota driver to a 'virtual' victory. The program generated 7780 tweets, a 38% increase in traffic volume. During the Tweet Race timeframe, social media traffic increased 212%. Even the NASCAR drivers got involved, tweeting to their followers to rally support.
Increased traffic to the Toyota Racing site continues to build awareness of the Toyota Racing brand with both racing fans and prospective Toyota owners.
VIEW THE SITE→
TOYOTA RACING, INSPIRED BY SPIRIT OF WAKU DOKI
MY ROLE ON THE PROJECT
I lead all UX engagements on iCrossing projects for Toyota. Over the last 9+ years, my work ranged from re-imagining parts of the main Toyota site (including the award-winning configurator for Toyota Tundra) to optimizing lead generation forms; to the design of the mobile Toyota Certified Used Vehicles site and Toyota Rent a Car program, among others.
On this particular engagement, my role focused on defining the user experience vision and strategy, and leading the UX team in the execution and design of an innovative, immersive experience tailored for the Toyota Racing fan.
01. Getting Started
01. Getting Started
Each project starts with the user. We identify the target audience, understand the business, study the market and translate insights into building interactive experiences that drive engagement and sales.
Collaborative Process
Our process is driven by close collaboration across the strategy, UX, design and technology teams to come up with innovative solutions.
03. Mapping site experience to serve fan needs
03. Mapping site experience to serve fan needs
You want to know all about Toyota racing at the NASCAR race this weekend? Start here.
Kyle Busch is your man. All the latest, and often exclusive, information about him is right here.
Often racing fans are avid followers of a series (like NASCAR), or specific drivers (like Kyle Busch). The simplified site structure emphasizes entry points that map directly to fan interests.
Live Feed
Live Feed
Waku-Soki. aka. Feel the Excitement
Instead of building a traditional website, we designed the site to act as a live stream of content.
The Feed
Photos, videos, stories, tweets are all incorporated into a feed, shown chronologically.
Site Structure
The simplified site navigation provides short-cuts to:
Series
Races
Drivers, and
Garage (where all active campaigns are housed)
The focus was on designing experiences that best capture the three distinctly different stages of the event timeline: pre-race, on race day, and post-event.
THE SHIFTING RACE PAGE: FOR PRE RACE, ON RACE DAY, POST RACE
Race Day Excitement
Beyond detailed information about the race, participating drivers, standings, the Race page invites fans to participate via the Pit Pass and Owner's Hospitality section.
Anticipation is Half the Fun
The Race page starts by highlighting records and past victories, details of the upcoming race, and a chance to buy tickets or add to calendar.
Post Race Exclusives
The Race page shows the final results, and lets fans view only-available-here photos, videos, interviews, etc.
04. Responsive Design
04. Responsive Design
Toyota Racing was one of the earliest responsive projects done by iCrossing.
Responsive Design System
We started by identifying the content, features and functionality for the site.
We then designed the module for each content type.
Next, we defined the responsive layout by defining when to stack, scale and compact modules to maintain an optimum user experience across devices.
04. It took teamwork to build this site.
04. It took teamwork to build this site.
The Toyota Racing site was designed to exemplify the spirit of racing.
A Responsive+ approach, pioneered by the technology team
The technology team went beyond traditional responsive design approach to include more client-side optimization in an effort to improve the performance of the site.
As explained by the technical team*: "This required server-side processing to optimize module and content loading based on user-agent detection to augment a responsive design solution. By employing these practices, you can write better, more modular code that can minimize overall combined page weight, DOM, CSS and JavaScript parsing and thus greatly improve site load times and UI performance"
*For further questions regarding technical approach, I'll have to refer you to my technical team members.
It took teamwork to build this site
The building of this site required close collaboration between the UX, design and technology teams. Frequent conversations, white-boarding sessions and weekly hangouts helped the team make smart decisions that created a rich, user-friendly website that performs well.