Hyundai Motor Company works to build lasting relationships with the media to establish its leadership in global markets. As part of this effort, in September 2023 it renewed the UX/UI of its corporate newsroom website. The new newsroom will serve as a core channel of corporate journalism, conveying Hyundai Motor Company’s brand values and vision.

Case Intelligence Summary

Pain Points

Some 2,000 press releases had piled up, but it was hard to find the information you wanted quickly.

Ranked third in global sales in 2022, Hyundai ran a global newsroom and nine regional newsrooms to match its new standing. The global newsroom, which had published more than 2,000 press releases since 2010, was the center of its PR. But aging UXUI — weak access to information, monotonous content and text-heavy releases — limited the media relationships Hyundai wanted to build. Satisfaction with automakers' newsrooms was lower than in other industries, and few scored well in Saltcake's expert evaluation. Since giving journalists and influencers trustworthy information quickly translates directly into brand image, a renewal was needed.

Strategic Lens

We divided the experience into two user journeys: exploring news and exploring resources.

To understand how media professionals want to reach information in a newsroom, we first studied leading overseas examples and interviewed the client and its operating agency. To tame the complexity of an automaker's newsroom — model news, motorsport, sponsorships and more — we introduced a finer taxonomy, which made the information structure twelve times larger. Visitors either want to pick out newsworthy stories fast or get multimedia assets — text, images, video — right away. So we split the user journey into 'news discovery' and 'resource discovery', designing a UI flow for each, letting users focus on what they are doing and feel the site is not complex.

Creative Approach

Customized UI by topic under unified UI principles delivered both diversity and simplicity.

Repeating the same UI looks simple but weakens the variety of ways to reach information. So instead of identical UI we set unified UI principles, applying customized UI by topic under those principles to the topic list screens that make up 90% of the structure, balancing diversity and simplicity. Pre-analysis broke newsroom content into 31 components: the elements were there, but they were managed for operators' convenience, making curation difficult. We tackled this across wireframes, storyboards, content operation guides and design guides, with the AEM component environment in mind. A rectangle metaphor drawn from the brand identity, with cubes of different sizes, expresses the richness of the content.

Delivered Experience

In September 2023 we launched a newsroom that makes it easy for reporters and journalists to read and take what they need.

In September 2023 the new newsroom opened, easy for journalists to read and take from. Press release pages deliver the essentials quickly with emphasized headlines and subheads and a flow in short sections, plus a progress bar showing where you are, buttons to copy the original text and view assets, quote sources shown with photos, and footnotes on the left so the eye isn't pulled away. A media kit available on every page and a media cart that downloads everything at once make gathering assets easy. A UX standard design guide based on the Brand Communication Guide was applied to every page, making the newsroom a foundation for an ongoing relationship between the company and the media.