Challenge
Dealers at Volvo Construction Equipment (VCE) need to stay up to date with Volvo’s offering to best support their clients. However, the current Volvo Dealer Network is difficult to navigate, and important product updates are easy to miss. As a result, there have been cases where dealers signed million-dollar contracts with clients, only to later discover that essential parts, options, or products were no longer available.
Step 1: Future vision and usability testing
Before joining the team, extensive user research had already been done: over 50 interviews were held with both dealers and Volvo stakeholders across the world. The research concluded clear pain points and needs for us to use as a foundation for our first prototype.
My first task in the project was to create a future vision for VDN, where we imagine a big overhaul not only on the interface but on the platform’s technical foundation and VCE's internal ways of working. We identified that much of the information currently shared on VDN as PDFs needed to be digitalised. The ambitions was to make VDN the true source of information for VCE products and services including all the latest updates and technical specifications. The vision also included using AI-powered search, integration of a few commonly used application and a community section for different areas where dealers can read and share their experience with each other.
Once we had our vision clear, we built two prototype and conducted 10 sessions with dealers of different sizes and markets to gather as much feedback as possible. The results were largely positive, with a few key takeaways:
- Complete technical specifications and a clear product history were identified as the two most important features for dealers, which was sufficiently included in the prototype.
- The term ‘AI’ divided opinions: some dealers didn’t want to engage with it at all, while others saw it as the future and the only way forward. Interestingly, it was the term itself that caused hesitation more than the actual experience of using the AI-powered search - copy matters.
- Many dealers wanted to share information with external users and looked for a way to easily download pages as PDFs. This indicates a clear need for external sharing options, which we plan to explore further.
Step 2: A realistic starting point
After the testing sessions, we refined the future vision based on the feedback and shifted focus to a realistic ‘first step’ version. Since the tested prototype was very visionary and required significant internal work across VCE, we decided to build a version that works with the current system and involves only a few smaller backend changes. This version can be developed further over time as we progress toward, and eventually beyond, our future vision.
This version still relied heavily on PDFs, so a major part of this solution was to improve the navigation and viewing experience of documents, as well as using tags to connect related documents and pages. It was also important to make sure the search was improved using a combination of AI and traditional search.
The project was put on pause summer 2025 due to due to major changes in team capacity. The project is scheduled to resume autumn 2026.
