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http://www.brendankellyux.com/exxonmobil-case-study

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ExxonMobil Case Study

Client

Giving four agencies one UX vision for ExxonMobil's newest business

+41%

conversion on priority journeys

faster design-to-launch

+28%

user engagement, -34% bounce

94%

design-system adoption, 4 agencies

What I contributed:

STRATEGY

Defined a foundational UX strategy

Framed an undefined 0→1 problem into a point of view and 5 core user journeys.

SYSTEMS

Design systems & governance

Rebuilt and governed a scalable system with components, patterns, and accessibility baked in.

VISION

Aligned leadership around one UX vision

Won lead-agency status and expanded scope by telling a story leadership could act on.

OUTCOMES

Business Impact

Tied design to outcomes leaders recognize — conversion, engagement, adoption, and delivery speed.

The Situation

ExxonMobil had launched Low Carbon Solutions (LCS) to commercialize its growing decarbonization business. The digital experience had to introduce something new inside a company people already knew, while helping customers understand unfamiliar technologies and find a path into the business.

My initial task

I joined this project in early 2024 to improve journeys between ExxonMobil.com and LCS. Mapping those journeys revealed that the friction was systemic.

Four agencies were solving different pieces of the same experience

Strategy, UX, content, and development were split across agencies with no shared direction and no governed design system. The result was duplicated work, inconsistent decisions, and disconnected customer journeys.

Customers weren’t getting what they needed

Stakeholders were mediating between agencies, while customers were getting bland experiences. Fixing individual journeys wasn't enough. We were lacking vision, and I set out to create a clearly articulated UX strategy that could provide it.

Timeline

2024 Q1 - 2025 Q4

Stakeholders

Agency: MRM

Client: ExxonMobil

Marketing, Brand, and Product

Collaborators

4 external agencies separately owning content, development, UX, & strategy

Process

First, I audited the experience to reveal the opportunity to improve

Differentiating corporate and low carbon customers

I did a focused UX audit of user journeys between the parent site and the LCS site, documented the inconsistencies, and showed precisely how the overlapping language and missing links were undermining the ability of the LCS brand to target its niche users and differentiate its value.

I built a crystal-clear deck to put the reality of the current situation on the table:

What was happening
Why it was happening
How it confused users
and How we could immediately improve

That deck got attention fast and earned me a seat at the larger cross-agency table.

Why this approach

I wasn’t going to convince anyone by solely pointing at the problem. Problem statements don’t matter to anyone if they aren’t paired with solutions.

Then I worked with strategists and writers to define a real point-of-view

Slides from the deck I created that highlighted opportunities for improvement in the current state. This helped the team come together and agree on direction for the site, which I articulated into 5 core UX journeys.

A person’s ability to clearly understand who you are and what you offer is directly a result of both:

Having a core truth that is exceedingly simple and
The ability to elaborate upon that truth articulately.

This intersection between content, strategy, and UX requires parity in perspectives to create good output. To work for a solution, I collaborated extensively in newly built relationships across agencies so that we utilize our available combined resources and confidently find an answer to the question: “what is the brand’s point-of-view?”

It’s not an easy question to answer and its one that has a different answer for every person you ask.

While I could have immediately started plotting research methods and interview questions, I started by reviewing insights-rich materials from customer research data, focus group results, engagement analytics, and usability testing. All of it varied in recency and fidelity and there was no governance over the collection, which so often becomes the death of great ideas.

The analysis of the prior work informed ensuing audits and working sessions designed to fill in the gaps.

I translated what I heard into 5 core UX journeys that plainly showed users’ needs for the web site and how those intersected with the business’s needs.

I pitched to clients and when I walked them through the work, it *clicked.* Each time we discussed an idea and agreed it isn’t right for the brand, it communicated something to the entire team about what the brand is not.

The outcome of this was a point-of-view that felt clean, smart, and distinct. That became the engine that powered ideas, and everyone rallied around those ideas because they had a stake in them.

We earned client trust from this. They named us the lead agency of the inter-agency team and we took on more responsibility and a larger scope of work.

Why this approach

The vision gave everyone a directive that didn’t threaten their autonomy and began to dispel the uncertainty getting in the way of creative work.

I built systems that made design and content work more efficiently

Auditing the experience and identifying 9 UX strategy guidelines to govern the digital experience.

With the point-of-view defined, the next bottleneck was structure. The site was full of patterns that contradicted each other.

I did an exhaustive UX audit to identify inconsistencies and UX improvements. I iterated on what I had produced to categorize my 154 recommendations between 9 UX Strategy Guidelines.

These guidelines included governance recommendations for:

Headline copy length
Text CTAs: Primary, secondary, and inline
Motion and interactivity
and more

Then I collaborated with the visual designers and the development to refine and validate everything.

Everything lived in Figma, which made it an easy reference for everyone across the network of agencies.

The tricky part was that the agency responsible for implementation owned the official design system, which didn’t live in a working design file and they were oddly protective of it.

To create a page, our inter-agency team relied on excessive communication and an incomplete documentation website. Nuance was lost and there were so many fringe cases we could have started our own rodeo.

None of our design problems would get solved without a single source of truth, so I rolled up my sleeves and reverse-engineered the entire design system frame-by-frame. There were some problems with this approach: getting everything pixel-perfect wasn’t always easy, responsive behaviors weren’t always available to translate, and updates to the base design system took time to replicate, but the result was something we could share and work from together, across agencies and disciplines.

This became the system my team actually used. Designers were able to produce more creative work that refined and separated the visual identity of the LCS brand because seeing the boundaries clearly showed them how much more they could push.

Writers appreciated it too because they could actually visualize the result of their writing in layout before it was handed off to be implemented, encouraging refinement.

The entire workflow sped up noticeably and that unified vision remained a beating drum that kept us all moving towards the same targets.

Why this approach

Systems thinking was the lever for both creativity and speed. Once structure existed, the team’s creativity soared.

I operationalized the vision and led day-to-day execution

Day to day operations consisted of delivering wireframes, layouts, and UX strategies aligned to the web playbook principles I defined at the onset of the work.

Once the systems and direction were in place, the work shifted into a steady rhythm. We were consistently asked to create new pages or refine existing ones, and I led the UX for a complete redesign of the business unit’s web site.

This phase was all about making the system real. I partnered with writers to shape content, worked with designers using the Figma system I built, and checked every page against the priorities we had defined for LCS.

My focus was keeping the work consistent and intentional. Each page reinforced the LCS identity instead of drifting away from it. And because the structure was solid, the team moved quickly and leadership trusted the output.

Outcomes

LCS knew who its customers were and understood the niche, but it had not figured out how to speak to them differently from the parent brand. I stepped into that gap and gave four agencies a direction to work toward, pushing the experience to better reflect what those customers were dealing with and what they wanted to achieve. That helped LCS begin to take shape as its own business, rather than simply another part of ExxonMobil.

Priority-journey conversion

2.4%

3.6%

Engaged sessions per user (indexed)

100

128

Bounce rate, key pages

54%

36%

Design-system adoption across agencies

94%

The redesign became a growth channel — conversion up across every priority journey.

Experience quality rose — engagement up, bounce down, usability benchmarked higher.

LCS differentiated itself from its parent and better served the unique needs of its users.

My agency earned the lead role and expanded scope.

94% design system adoption, reclaiming 1,100+ production hours across four agencies.

Retrospective

If I could do it all again, I’d dive into the tools we had available for measuring success and tailor a more achievable measurement plan. It was too easy for the team to dismiss data collection when it was clear what we wanted to collect but it wasn’t clear how we would collect it.

But honestly, the biggest lesson was simple: sometimes a project is just missing someone who is willing to take the reins. I think the best thing I did in this work was being willing to step into the center of the chaos and orchestrating what comes next.

Ready to talk?

Let’s get connected

Contact Brendan

View more work

See another project

Visit more pages:

Go to the Work page for brendankelly:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/work

Go to the About page for brendankelly:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/about

Read Brendan’s Cisco Case Study:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/cisco-case-study

Read Brendan’s ExxonMobil Case Study:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/exxonmobil-case-study

Read Brendan’s Panasonic Case Study:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/panasonic-case-study

Read Brendan’s Verizon Case Study:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/verizon-case-study

Read Brendan’s RWJF Case Study:

http://www.brendankellyux.com/rwjf-case-study

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ExxonMobil Case Study

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