Overview

Provide a sustainable online mobile platform for current and future needs of Michelin US and other entities.

Role

Bring to the team experience and knowledge on mobile experiences and flows to be accountable for the whole mobile part of the platform.

Working with another product designer and our manager, along with two senior art directors and of course engineers.

Timeframe

2014 - 2,5 months

Goals and challenges

Create a unified mobile platform for Michelin US and scale it to other key markets, including BRICS. The main challenge: regional entities had built incompatible mobile experiences with no shared templates, navigation, or content strategy. This fragmentation fractured the brand and blocked global campaigns.

Approach & process

Three priorities guided the strategy: SEO (to strengthen visibility and reinforce content accuracy), ROPO (research online, purchase offline — to improve conversion in the store journey), and brand reassurance (to build buyer confidence across regions).

Discovery, Definition & Execution

We grounded the work in research: user studies and competitive analysis surfaced key constraints. The main issues centered on tire/vehicle matching, catalog filtering, localization, and emergency support scenarios. We then adapted the web journeys for mobile, adding mobile-specific features at each step. Wireframes and prototypes of key templates followed. HTML/CSS/JS prototypes (built with Bootstrap) let us refine interactions and flows before handing off to engineering.

Learnings

The search funnel emerged as the critical moment in the journey — that became the foundation for all subsequent design iterations. I learned to balance user needs with business constraints: the platform had to serve both buyers seeking tires and the company's regional operations. Design decisions ripple through every phase, so clarity early on saves effort later.