Posted by Thomas Feldhaus, Managing Director, Jung von Matt/NEXT ALSTER
Read more about BMW.com in the AMP case study on AMPproject.org or on Jung von Matt’s page here.
“What a nice challenge!” That’s what we thought when we won the job to relaunch the digital home of BMW, BMW.com, and to excite users by transforming the website from only a web showroom to a data driven, entertaining and helpful state of the art automotive content marketing platform.
Our creatives, strategists and consultants discussed every little detail of the task: digital strategies, content strategies, media strategies, social media strategies, KPIs and so on: everything needed to reach the long-term goal of getting car enthusiasts and those generally interested in mobility excited about the beauty of the BMW brand.
As an agency well-known for creative excellence, our friends in the creative department wanted users to plunge into a digital adventure that would totally ‘wow’ them – with everything an ultramodern user experience has to provide: inspiring articles with high-res images, smooth full-screen videos and a state-of-the-art user interaction design. By setting up this seamless experience, we knew we could meet our goals of reaching users when they were interested in our content.
Let the code experts take the lead and performance will follow
There is a known cliche cliché that developers are just seen as the “code monkeys” who put a stop to any creative concept. Not in our case, because we all agreed that the critical success factor would be: PERFORMANCE!!!
Our simple formula was “No performance, no fun. Mo’ performance, mo’ fun!” Because what’s the value of super-fancy content if it takes you ages to load on your mobile device.
By using a technical strategy that allowed performance and visual and engaging content to coexist via the combination of AMP and PWA (Progressive Web Apps), we hardly had to make any compromises. Not to mention the fact that we liked that AMP pages are linked and load quickly from all platforms, like Google Search and Twitter.
So in close collaboration with UX, designers and editors we started working on the new BMW.com, with our focus turned 100% to delivering the best-ever mobile user experience.
Close collaborations and requirements for fast, engaging user experiences
Every creative wish brought to our attention was checked for its feasibility with AMP. With the limitation of 50 KB in CSS, we started to research, develop and test whether a desired feature was realisable with the PWA technology. For example, we were able to implement the feature of swiping smoothly from one article to the next whilst remain super-fast – an experience users would normally only expect from a native app.
If the team said, “There’s no chance to implement the feature without a loss of speed”, the whole agency backed our decision, because we were all committed to one divine command: performance.
It also certainly helped that during our development journey, the AMP team was friendly and helpful via Slack, GitHub and in person at conferences.
The world’s fastest* automotive content marketing website
Working with AMP not only demonstrated to us what a great technology it is, but also what is possible if the development and creative teams agree on a plan from the very first line of code.
The result of all the work: a website that loads unbelievably fast. The all-new BMW.com – possibly the world’s fastest automotive content marketing website. Read more about our results in the recent AMP case study.
Challenge us
Are you up for a challenge? Which major car brand has the fastest automotive website? See how we score on the Visually Complete Index on webpagetest.org. #automotivespeedindex
*Possibly the world’s fastest automotive content marketing website. Please take a look at our challenge for further details.
Read more about BMW.com in the AMP case study on AMPproject.org or on Jung von Matt’s page here.