Volvo Search
Opportunity
This project came off the back of my work on Kia's car configurator, a previous engagement that went so well Kia came back with a new challenge.
During that period, a global chip shortage was causing significant delays in car delivery timelines, pushing customers to wait months for their configured vehicle.
The idea emerged: what if customers could find a similar or identical vehicle already in stock at a nearby dealer?
Facing an increasingly competitive automotive landscape online, Kia decided to invest in improving their Stock Locator experience, helping customers find the right car now, rather than wait.
Flow
To support consistency across a large team and many event types, I built a centralized component library, buttons, forms, icons, navigation, cards, all adhering to shared visual guidelines and interaction standards.
This reduced friction in handoffs and kept the product coherent as it scaled.
Volvo Insights page
Search modal, featured
Search modal, results
.CrOZKaZo_Z19Dp6q.webp)
Result page
Icons
In case there was no image available for a certain search result, an icon would be shown as a fallback. Each content type in the search experience is represented by a distinct icon.
This approach helps users quickly identify and differentiate results at a glance. Also a category text label is displayed on top of each result.
Generic
Image
Document
Event
Job
News
Press Release
Product
Search results ⋅ images
Search results ⋅ icons
User Research
Usability testing was conducted with 5 participants, covering a range of user profiles from casual car browsers to active buyers. Sessions were run remotely using a clickable prototype, with tasks focused on searching, filtering, and interpreting results.
The sessions revealed that users responded well to the icon fallback system, most understood the content type at a glance without needing to read the label.
However, a key insight was that participants expected image-rich results to load faster, and were more likely to engage with results that showed a vehicle photo over those showing a generic icon.
This reinforced the decision to prioritize image coverage in the data pipeline, and to make the icon fallbacks as visually distinct as possible per content type.
Final Thoughts
Despite being a short engagement, this project punched above its weight. The search experience touched multiple content types, teams, and markets across Volvo, which made the collaborative process essential rather than optional.
Seeing a relatively focused design challenge have real impact at scale across the organization was a good reminder that doing the foundational work well, icon systems, fallback logic, usability validation, creates outsized value when the product reaches a global audience.
Thanks for reading, want to collaborate together? Contact me here
