Snap-on Diagnostics develop and supply market leading diagnostic equipment and software to garages.
If you’ve ever taken your car in to be checked there’s a good chance it’s met with a piece of Snap-on equipment.
Snap-on Diagnostics approached Bigfork for help with their vehicle coverage guide, a comprehensive data-set that details the functions of their software for every vehicle it can connect with.
The challenge
The vehicle coverage guide included over a quarter of a million lines of data which was published in a brochure so large it would put a 90’s Yellow Pages to shame, and also distributed as a PDF that would cripple all but the fastest of internet connections.
This needed updating twice a year which was done manually, and as well as being incredibly time consuming, it was prone to human error. The vehicle coverage guide is used by automotive technicians all over the world, and in its current format it just wasn’t working.
The plan
Our plan was to design and build a fast, searchable, web-based product to make Snap-on’s data much easier to access for their customers.
The good news was their data was excellent and readily available as well-formatted Excel files. So, we worked with Snap-on to formulate a plan. We’d develop a web-based product that could import all the data and display it using easily searchable tool.
As well as this, the existing coverage guide included marketing materials covering new features, significant additions and updates, and links to resources including training videos. So we knew we also needed a marketing website for this material, which was no problem, we’d build the coverage tool into the website for the best of both worlds.
We ran some initial user experience workshops with Snap-on to learn more about their data and how it would be used, which gave us the insights we needed to start work on a solution.
The product
The marketing content was the simple part, we designed a bespoke website following Snap-on’s brand guidelines backed up with a Silverstripe content management system so they could easily keep it up to date for new releases.
And for the coverage search? We developed a bespoke tool within Silverstripe that allowed Snap-on to upload all their data at once, and within 30-minutes the system would process it and have it ready for users to browse. We needed a checking process, just in case, so the import automatically creates drafts for testing and maintains versions that can be rolled back. Plus, data could be updated on a manufacturer or single-row basis for minor tweaks, or for a mid-release cycle update.
The result
By moving away from a monolithic brochure to a user friendly, web-based product, Snap-on's customers can now access Snap-on's vehicle coverage guide data quickly and easily. This helps them do their jobs better and enhances Snap-on's brand reputation for the highest quality automotive tools.
Because the data was imported direct from the source, there’s no possibility of human error, and no need to spend weeks and money producing and printing a catalogue.
And with the addition of Google Analytics, the vehicle coverage guide was measurable for the first time
The website launched to hugely positive feedback from both our client and its users.
So much so, it gained interest from Snap-on divisions across the globe, and we’ve now rolled out versions to North America, Australia, and Europe – including translations and bespoke additions based on each region’s requirements.
