Guangzhou Automotive Company 广州汽车集团

Role: Digital Strategy, Experience Design Lead

Team: Lei Tang, Renbo, Chen @ PwC

Driven by GAC Group’s “14th Five-Year Plan” to accelerate global expansion, the company targeted the European market to enhance its international competitiveness. However, this market presented significant challenges, including strict regulatory compliance, low brand awareness, and differences in cultural and digital user habits between China and Europe. GAC urgently needed a comprehensive digital roadmap and a localized Owner’s App as the initial digital initiative to kick off their market entry.

Digital Strategy Blueprinting: Conducted extensive internal interviews and deep benchmarking against leading EV exporters (including NIO, BYD, SAIC, and Xpeng). Mapped out end-to-end business scenarios across R&D, production, supply chain, sales, and services to define an overarching European digital architecture (encompassing DMS, ERP, TSP, and App systems).

Cultural Decoding & UX Strategy: As the Experience Design Lead, I translated cultural and behavioral differences into actionable product design principles. Defined three core design pillars for the app: Enhancing Brand & Product Display, Aligning with Overseas Minimalist Trends, and Maximizing Usability & Efficiency.

Intuitive Interaction Design: Shifted away from complex domestic layouts to a flat, card-based minimalist visual style heavily preferred by European users. Innovated “intuitive interactions” for core vehicle controls—such as swipe-to-adjust temperature and unified status/action cards using pop-up layers—significantly reducing user friction and cognitive load.

Successfully delivered a robust, system-level digital strategy roadmap alongside the complete UX/UI design framework for the Owner’s App. By launching the Owner’s App as the very first digital initiative, the project successfully established GAC’s direct-to-consumer digital touchpoints in Europe, serving as the crucial first step in executing their ambitious European market entry strategy.