Bridgestone: Global Website Consolidation
Client Description
Bridgestone Corporation, the world’s largest tire and rubber company, produces and markets Bridgestone and Firestone tires along with a range of diversified products across North and Latin America, as well as Europe. The company operates roughly 50 production facilities and employs around 55,000 people throughout these regions.
Project Overview
This project set out to bring multiple B2B and B2C websites together into one consistent, easy-to-use digital experience. Instead of being built around separate business units, the new approach focused on customer needs, making it easier for different audiences to find what they’re looking for.
Impact At-A-Glance
+93% time spent on site (nearly doubled YOY)
+27% PDP page views
+71% PLP page views
Project Type
Global Website Consolidation
Role
Researcher, Design Lead
Company
iCrossing
Problem Statement
Bridgestone’s digital ecosystem was fragmented, with siloed experiences for commercial and consumer audiences. This lack of integration created overlap, and limited opportunities to cross-sell products and solutions. Maintaining these disconnected platforms also required significant human, technical, and operational resources, reducing overall efficiency.
Project Goal
To unify the digital ecosystem into a cohesive, audience-focused platform. The solution needed to clearly differentiate between consumer and commercial journeys, strengthen brand consistency, and reduce operational overhead through a more streamlined architecture.
Discovery
I led a four-month discovery focused on B2B and B2C audience understanding to uncover needs, behaviors, and opportunities. Insights from this phase informed design decisions and aligned the team on strategic priorities for the project.
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS | Engaged 23 extended stakeholders across 9 B2B and B2C business groups to understand customer needs and behaviors for retread, consumer tire and motorcycle tire, and gather key business insights to ensure our user experience aligns with business goals.
INTERVIEW SYNTHESIS | From the 9 interview groups, we synthesized our notes into audience-based key findings.
Then grouped them into global themes and audience based themes.
COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKING | Competitive benchmarking assessed B2B and B2C experiences by understanding how they measure up in the competitive landscape, establishing a baseline that we can measure ourselves against over time, and identifying best-in-class competitive experiences.
FUNCTIONALITY AND COMPONENT GAP ANALYSIS | A features and functionality gap analysis was conducted to pinpoint gaps between current capabilities and desired future-state needs. Each feature was scored by reusability: net new, adaptable, or repurpose.
In total, the team audited 4 North America sites, 30 LATAM sites, and 63 EMEA sites.
PERSONAS | Personas were developed through secondary research using existing data, social listening, user-generated insights, and stakeholder interviews.
Full-fidelity example
TREE TESTING | Tree testing was conducted with 105 screened participants to validate UX decisions and assess the navigational complexities of a unified site serving multiple audience segments, including commercial, automotive, and motorcycle customers.
Overall task success was strong, with consumers performing slightly better. Key opportunities include clarifying educational tool segmentation and improving cross-linking to boost searchability.
Wireframes
Over a six-month wireframing phase, I led a cross-functional team focused on designing with component reusability at the core. The work guided teams toward system-aligned solutions that fit delivery constraints, prioritizing efficiency while recommending ways to meet user needs without introducing net-new elements.
As part of consolidation, the unified site delivers a seamless shopping experience, allowing customers to easily switch between Consumer and Commercial products and solutions.
Commercial Homepage
Consumer Homepage
Commercial PLP
Commercial PDP
Commercial Retread Savings Calculator
Commercial Retread Savings Calculator
Commercial Dealer Search Results
Consumer Dealer Search with self-selection for Automotive or Motorcycle results.
Consumer Resource Center
The Consumer Tire Decision Guide lets users input information to receive personalized tire matches. Testing insights are outlined below.
Personalized match results generated from the 6-step tool.
Testing
The Tire Decision Guide is a shopping tool designed to help consumers, especially those less familiar with tire buying, find curated tire matches by entering personalized vehicle details. During the consolidation, the tool underwent an experience redesign, and user testing was conducted to evaluate how easily users could complete core tasks.
USABILITY TESTING | Unmoderated usability testing was conducted to evaluate the experience, focusing on process intuitiveness, users’ ability to answer questions, the value of match results for purchase decisions, clarity of next steps in the buying journey, and overall usefulness of the tool.
10 screened participants (5 mobile, 5 desktop) were asked task-based questions.
Essential UX improvements were implemented and documented, while lower-priority enhancements were backlogged for future phases.
The Impact
The rebuild delivered a 93% increase in time spent on site YoY, with visitors exploring significantly more pages (+71% PLP views and +27% PDP views). The new architecture is supporting stronger engagement, higher return visits, and more meaningful browsing behavior.
The result is a future-ready platform that’s scalable, cost-efficient, and optimized to provide enhanced user experiences and stronger conversion opportunities for key audiences.