Polestar – Building a future-proof & comprehensive hub for sustainability information

Storytelling for sustainability: rebuilding an information hub

Polestar

2024

code d'azur (Hypersolid)

See live project

Polestar

2024

code d'azur (Hypersolid)

See live project

Project goals

Polestar wanted to update the sustainability webpages to reflect the continuous improvements they do in sourcing, production practices and material innovations - something that wasn't clear in the existing pages. With sustainability being a core brand pillar, the outdated pages were undermining their messaging. The team set out to:

1. Create a comprehensive, transparent information hub

2. Meet user's demand for complete information

3. Keeping page editing client-side simple

Role

Product & visual design

Outcome

30% improvement in session duration

Significant reduction in bounce rate

Positive media recognition (online editorial articles)

Future proof design: modularly expandable, easy to edit templates

User activity types

Casual exploration

Curious, relaxed browsing. May be directed from various touchpoints like social campaigns or product pages etc.

Information seeking

Investigative, wary of greenwashing and actively seeking proof of the brand promise of sustainability in order to convert to buying.

PR / Journalism professionals

Professionals who use the sustainability pages and reports as a source for reporting.

What does future-proofing mean here?

To keep these page designs relevant, they have to be easily expandable in order to accommodate an exapnding range of car sustainability reports, innovative materials, traceable materials, and even editorial stories.

To make this happen, we focused on using established design system components for these types of content without extensive custom work, so CMS editing is possible without further design and development bandwidth.

Design considerations

Fixing design shortcomings

In the earlier landing page, users mistook titles for links. This pointed out topics that needed expansion and a need for clearer entry points to those topics' pages, so we used a grid of large blocks to highlight the four sustainability pillars.

Using design constraints to our advantage

A limited palette of background colour was used for information grouping, for example to distinguish between material types: white for innovation, black for trace and risk materials such as heavy metals.