AKQA were tasked with creating a new global car configurator for Volkswagen, along with a new digital business strategy to set Volkswagen apart from it’s competitors – and to do it in just 6 months. As lead designer on this project I was in charge of defining concept and creative direction of the project, managing a small team of designers and working closely with front-end-development to build the fully HTML5 configuration site.

The configurator features social recommendations and statistical data to help users make choices while configuring, based on the actions of their fellow drivers. The HTML5 application site pushed technological boundaries with a fully interactive and dynamic interface that works not only in browsers but on an iPad and iPhone. The interface carries the user from research through to purchase at a dealer in one seamless experience.

Since its launch in November 2010, over 2,000,000 drivers (as of June 2011) have configured a car (with over 300,000 on iPad), and the project as a whole was featured in WIRED Magazine’s February 2011 Social Commerce edition. As a direct result of this project, Volkswagen have now become AKQA’s largest client.

Lead designer: Neil Gurr – Designer: Nick Mulley – Creative Direction: Chris May

After successfully delivering several projects, AKQA were required to present a vision of how we could expand on our success and create a unified set of ideas to drive Volkswagen's global digital strategy forward.
The concepts, although intended for global markets, were conceived as a complete lifecycle for customers in the US. This allowed us to concentrate on creating compelling strategies for each step of the customers engagement.
I worked hand in hand with Daniel Coppock, a senior User Experience Architect who has been my partner for the last year, to come up with a complete set of concepts. Together we covered the roles of strategy, concept, design, user experience and copy. Working to create a pitch deck that senior partners at AKQA could present to the client.
I am pleased to say that the pitch went well and secured the Volkswagen account for the next 2 years making it AKQA's biggest account alongside Nike.
The work you see is a small selection of concepts from the pitch creative. They cover several stages of the user journey from initial engagement, through discovery, refinement, contact, purchase and finally continued engagement through to repurchase.