Summary
We designed new features on a mobile responsive framework to help Grassroots Motorsports keep their loyal community of car enthusiasts engaged and entertained.
Services
User interface design, Responsive design, Django development
Have an idea in mind? We’d love to hear about it.
Stephan Barrett
Founder, CEO
The most popular section of the Grassroots Motorsports website is their forums. Grassroots Motorsports even created a ‘mobile friendly’ version of just the forums for people visiting on the go.
Supporting two code sets was cumbersome, and since we were building their new site to be mobile responsive, we could trim the additional application and focus on creating a delightful experience for mobile forum users.
The outcome
The strength of the Grassroots Motorsports brand is its community. We helped nudge those people closer together and created more loyalty to the brand, which is exactly what makes Grassroots Motorsports successful.
Since launch, we're seeing increased sales, longer visit times on site, and we have a clearer understanding of how users want and need to navigate.
Unifying the community experience
Many existing community members headed straight for the forums to join the latest conversations. But the forums didn’t expose content on other sections of the site. Plus, members couldn’t easily find other members that shared their interests.
To solve those challenges, we designed a dashboard that allows members to specify the content they want by selecting the auto brands they follow. With this approach, more meaningful content is displayed without searching and members can quickly find other members that love the same cars.
When members select auto brands to follow, their dashboard pulls related content automatically.
To help spread the word of the new member dashboard, we designed a system to expand awareness for non-members to join the community and take advantage of the ability to aggregate content based on their preferences.
Grassroots Motorsports publishes content on their site daily. But with so many members heading straight to forums, it was clear forums were the place to stay informed inside the community. In fact, internal teams were publishing in other places and duplicating the content on the forums to ensure everyone had a chance to see the latest info.
To improve efficiencies and content awareness, we designed a system that allowed Grassroots Motorsports to publish once and automatically create a forum thread, linking the content and forum together. Plus, instead of a unique and separate commenting system on non-forum content, we unified forum comments and content comments together. This led to a much faster way to publish content and inspire more community involvement.
With many visual misalignments and an unintuitive user experience, the existing website offered a poor reflection on the Grassroots Motorsports brand.
The old Grassroots Motorsports homepage suffered from content sprawl providing less visibility to high-demand areas and conversion paths.Our mission was to create the best way current and new community members could learn and share all things Grassroots Motorsports.
Building the foundation
The new website needed a strong foundation to build from. So we created wireframes and prototypes based on business goals and user needs. We landed on a design that was much simpler to use and allowed for the most important content to be found first.
The challenge
Grassroots Motorsports Magazine is an online community and magazine for car enthusiasts. But at the core, it’s so much more. Being part of the Grassroots Motorsports community gives you inside access to the car industry from what feels like a group of friends.
After completing a responsive website redesign for their sister publication, Classic Motorsports Magazine, Motorsport Marketing was ready for us to tackle the redesign for their flagship publication.