Redesigning NissanUSA.com.

What was getting in the way.

NissanUSA.com is the brand's main digital storefront. Millions of shoppers a month land there to research vehicles, compare pricing, and find dealers. By the time we got involved, the site had drifted. The architecture was fragmented, the design system felt about five years behind, and the customer data the team had on hand wasn't really shaping the decisions getting made.

I led research and strategy on the redesign. Mobile was the priority. So was moving decisions out of the conference room and back into evidence, and making the thing easier to use end-to-end.

Research, IA, and strategy lead.

I owned the research plan and ran the foundational studies myself, then translated the findings into a strategy the rest of the team could build against. That meant annotated wireframes, a content framework, and a phased rollout the business could actually execute on without grinding the roadmap to a halt.

• Ran research across discovery, validation, and post-launch
• Kept Marketing, IT, Dealer Support, and Digital Innovation pointed in the same direction

Day to day, I worked most closely with the PM, the BAs, and the lead engineer. The BAs held the business requirements and had the clearest view of what was actually in scope, so I made it a priority to bring research findings directly into those conversations rather than filtering them through a deck. The PM kept the schedule honest and helped me flag when a UX ask was going to blow a deadline before it actually did. With engineering, I worked in the same tools and joined planning sessions so the wires I was handing over matched what was actually buildable in the timeframe we had.

What we did first.

Discovery looked like what discovery usually looks like: stakeholder interviews, analytics, competitor benchmarking, a heuristic review. We paired all of it with moderated usability sessions, half first-time shoppers, half returning ones, so we could see where the experience broke for each.

How the work was structured.

The engagement ran thirteen months across six phases. Research stayed open the entire time rather than closing out before design started, which meant each phase could shape the next as findings came in.

13-Month Engagement · Nissan North America · Click any step to expand

Structuring the homepage before visual design.

Before any visual design work started, we blocked out the homepage as a low-fidelity wireframe: hero imagery, the offer/APR callout, the CTA, and the utility icon row beneath it. Stripping away color and imagery at this stage kept early reviews focused on hierarchy and content priority instead of aesthetic opinions, which is exactly the kind of blunter, more useful feedback wireframes tend to produce.

Mapping how people actually move through it.

Journey mapping and a couple of co-design sessions with stakeholders helped us land on the five flows that actually mattered: Vehicle Discovery, Build & Price, Dealer Locator, Financing, and Offers. Everything else either fed into those or could wait.

Three Nissan shoppers, three paths through the redesign.

The Comparison Shopper weighs Nissan against Honda and Toyota. The First-Time Buyer is trying to figure out what a trim level even is. The Returning Loyalist already knows the lineup and just wants a fast lane. Toggle through each journey to see how the redesign shaped itself to whoever's on it.

Mobile wireframes that translated the journey into screens.

The journey maps gave us the emotional arc. The wireframes translated each peak and dip into a decision the page had to make. We wireframed mobile-first because that's where most of the friction lived, and because Build & Price had been the hardest screen on the legacy site for small displays. Three frames did most of the heavy lifting: the lineup landing, the model detail page, and the configurator.

Three patterns drove the layouts: persistent shopping tools, modular sections that stay collapsed until a shopper opens them, and a sticky payment bar on the configurator so the price never leaves the screen.

The engineer was in the room for the wireframe reviews. That was intentional. Build & Price on mobile had real rendering constraints, and the sticky payment bar in particular needed to be stress-tested against the component model before anyone got attached to it. Having engineering weigh in at the wire stage meant the decisions that survived into hi-fi were ones we already knew could ship.

The Rogue® Build & Price flow on mobile.

Build & Price was the hardest screen on the legacy site for small displays. It asked shoppers to compare trims side by side, track a running price, evaluate packages, and make financial decisions, all on a surface where horizontal space collapses and dense tables become unreadable. The legacy implementation stacked everything vertically without priority, buried the estimated total below the fold, and gave no persistent anchor for the price as shoppers scrolled. People were making configuration choices without being able to see what those choices cost in real time. The redesign kept the estimated MSRP locked to the bottom of the screen throughout, collapsed package details behind expandable rows, and simplified trim comparison to a single selectable card per option. These are the final mobile screens that came out of that work: trim selection with live pricing, a build summary before dealer handoff, and the quote request that closes the loop.

Three rounds of testing.

The first round used wireframes on purpose. We wanted to know whether the structure and the content hierarchy were working before anyone spent time on visual design. When you put a polished prototype in front of a participant, they react to the surface: the colors, the type, the overall aesthetic. You end up with feedback about whether something looks trustworthy instead of whether they can actually find what they came for. Wireframes strip that away. Participants have nothing to grab onto except the layout and the content, which is exactly what we needed to stress-test. They also tend to speak more freely. A polished design carries an implicit signal that the decisions are finished, and people are more likely to hedge their criticism or talk themselves out of a concern. A wireframe reads as a work in progress, and participants treat it that way. We got blunter, more useful feedback. If a shopper couldn't locate the trim comparison at that fidelity, a coat of paint wasn't going to fix it. It also let us run more iterations cheaply. We could pull a frame apart and reroute it between sessions without waiting on a design review cycle.

We benchmarked against the legacy site, then tested mid-fi prototypes and the pre-launch build. A/B tests covered CTA wording and mobile-first layouts. Here's what each round taught us:

• Round 1 (wireframes): Navigation wasn't the problem. Shoppers found models without much friction. The real failure was trim comparison: participants kept looking for a dedicated compare button that didn't exist, and when they couldn't find one, they gave up instead of reading the spec tables we'd already built. We restructured the entry point before moving to visual design.
• Round 2 (mid-fi): The persistent MSRP bar on Build & Price made an immediate difference. When the price scrolled out of view, participants stopped making configuration decisions and started second-guessing whether they were even on the right page. Keeping the total anchored to the bottom reduced that hesitation significantly. CTA wording also mattered more than expected: "Build Your Rogue" drove noticeably higher task completion than "Get Started."
• Round 3 (pre-launch): The mobile scroll depth improvements held under realistic conditions, and the new IA reduced the number of participants who bounced from key pages without clicking anything. The one thing that didn't fully land: the offers panel was still being missed by first-time buyers who didn't know incentives were available. We flagged it for a post-launch iteration.
• Across all three rounds: Participants in wireframe sessions gave feedback that held up through launch. Structural decisions we validated in round one didn't get reversed in round three. Running research at the earliest possible fidelity wasn't just cheaper. It was more predictive.

Here's what moved in the metrics:

• Homepage engagement: +40% scroll-through, measured via scroll depth analytics
• Build & Price on mobile: more shoppers finishing the full configurator flow instead of dropping off mid-way
• Bounce rate: fewer people leaving without clicking anything on the key pages

What stuck.

What I took away.

The biggest lesson from this one: research works best when it stays open the whole time, not when it's a phase you finish before design starts. Every decision that held up post-launch was one we could trace back to something a real shopper did. The other thing I didn't expect to matter as much as it did was the UX framework we left behind. Nissan reused it on later campaigns, and that long tail of value is the kind of thing that's easy to underestimate when you're scoping the work.

The broader takeaway, and the one I carry into every automotive engagement now: a visually strong site is not the same as a usable one. The previous NissanUSA.com was not an ugly site. It had production-quality photography, a consistent visual language, and real craft in the art direction. What it lacked was a UX layer that helped shoppers orient, prioritize, and move forward. Pages that looked right still stopped people cold because nothing told them where to go next.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. In automotive, the design bar is high across the board. Most OEM sites look polished. Most of them also have the same core problems: too much information competing for attention at once, navigation that reflects internal org structure instead of how shoppers think, and key tasks buried behind visual storytelling that's compelling but not useful. The visual quality can actually mask the usability problems for a while, which is why the problems persist. You have to watch real shoppers use the thing before you know where it's actually breaking down.

Closing that gap requires research that runs alongside design, not before it as a phase you check off and move past. Every round of testing we ran changed something about the direction we were headed. That kind of ongoing feedback loop is what separates a site that looks good in a screenshot from one that actually moves people through a decision. Good design gets someone to stop. Good UX gets them to stay.

What's next.

• Save-and-return shopping across devices
• Dealer inventory pulled into Build & Price and Offers
• More mobile work on IA and content density
• Quarterly usability testing as a standing rhythm
• Better KPI tracking down at the micro-interaction level