Bosch. UCD for DIY and Garden

About

Bosch Home & Garden is one of Europe’s most recognized names in DIY and power tools, with a vast product range spanning power tools, garden equipment, and home solutions. Yet their digital presence was fragmented across markets, with outdated platforms and inconsistent brand expression. To create a future-proof digital ecosystem, Bosch needed a new responsive website, a unified CMS, and a rebrand that could merge product catalogs with content-driven community features.

The challenge

While Bosch is known worldwide for engineering quality and reliability, its Home & Garden division struggled with a digital experience that hadn’t kept pace with customer expectations. Multiple sites, legacy systems, and separate DIY communities diluted the brand and confused users. Working with Experience One in Berlin, I led the UX design to deliver a responsive, content-driven platform and new design system that brought together over 100 product guidelines into a consistent, customer-centric experience.

Project Breakdown

Context

  • Client: Bosch, German DYI and power tools

  • Challenge: new responsive site, new CMS, new design system

  • Role: Senior UX designer

  • Agency: Experience One, Berlin

  • Team: 2 Visual designers, 2 UX, 1 Project manager, 1 Scrum Master

  • Timeline: 8 months. 2017

My role and approach

  • Designed wireframes, flows, user journey maps, IA maps

  • Worked in Agile sprints with cross-functional teams in Berlin and Stuttgart

  • Conducted stakeholder interviews and design workshops to align business units

  • Used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research to inform design

  • Developed user journeys incrementally and shipped them for remote development

  • Connected an off-the-shelf UGC platform into Bosch’s digital ecosystem for DIY content

Key UX Solutions

  • User-Centric Redesign: simplified navigation, introduced semantic search, refreshed taxonomy, and streamlined product discovery across multiple catalogs

  • DIY Community Integration: merged three local DIY platforms into one hub, connecting blogs, product reviews, tutorials, and events into Bosch’s ecosystem

  • Content Strategy: curated user-generated content alongside editorial contributions to bring “Home Made by You” to life

  • New Brand Guide: collaborated with Bosch Corporate Design and Bosch.IO to create a company-wide design system hosted in Frontify, reducing 100+ guidelines into one flexible, global standard

  • Workshops & Alignment: ran stakeholder workshops in Stuttgart and Berlin to align design, engineering, and business units on customer-centric processes

  • Ecosystem Support: integrated warranties, spare parts, and user subscriptions to enrich post-purchase experiences

Impact

  • Created Bosch’s first unified digital brand presence and reskin for Home & Garden

  • Increased traffic to e-commerce site through UGC-driven content and DIY inspiration

  • Delivered a scalable UI Design System now used across Bosch’s digital products worldwide

  • Helped Bosch shift toward a customer-centric digital culture, aligning design and engineering efforts across markets

Collage of various people engaging in home activities with the text "Home made by you." in the center on a green wooden sign.

The challenge. A future-proof digital ecosystem

The challenge was to lead the redesign of Bosch Home and Garden brand and e-commerce platform, merge power tools, garden tools and home appliances catalogues. All working with separate business units in multiple markets.

A parallel,  content driven workstream was the merge of three location based DIY user  communities into one single website, define a tech-stack and roll out new content.
We worked in Agile with a hybrid team of 2 visual, 2 UX Designers, one Project Manager. Analytics were briefed out on an ad hoc basis. Research insights were outsourced to an external planning team. We shipped user journeys incrementally for remote development, with bi-weekly meetings with our Scrum Master and POs in Berlin and Stuttgart. We used quantitative and qualitative data paired with strategic business insights  to drive our design decisions at every step of the process.

A detailed diagram illustrating the overall HG framework with various website modules, community features, personal services, editorial content, and trade integrations arranged around a central MyBosch ID.

User Generated Content to rebrand DIY

We reimagined our entire digital landscape to align seamlessly with Bosch fresh brand vision: "Home Made By You." We took a deep dive into our existing website content, dissecting its intricacies and engaging with our users to understand their favorite pathways.

Recognizing our users' strong passion for DIY, we decided to create a vibrant digital community centered around it, driving more traffic to our e-commerce platform. Over seven months, we carefully defined a content strategy that connected an off-the-shelf UGC platform to the core of the Bosch digital ecosystem. This strategy included blogs, product reviews, events, and DIY projects, all carefully curated by our Bosch editorial team or selected from user submissions.

Flowchart illustrating the design process at Bosch from briefing to release, including stages like project planning, design research, interaction and visual design, prototyping, user testing, and final approval, with roles and tools outlined.
Diagram showing three core use cases: Solutions Development, Communications Brand and Business, and Onboarding and Training, each with associated features highlighted in different colors and a description of platform solutions and goals.
Flowchart comparing multiple user groups and shared solutions, including roles, needs, and content types like dynamic, interactive, static, and downloadable assets, with Bosch logo in bottom right corner.
A chart titled 'Roles and pain points' illustrating roles, responsibilities, and challenges in a design process. The chart includes sections listing various roles such as external design agency, product managers, art directors, UX designers, UI developers, and associated pain points like lack of specialist design knowledge, management issues, unclear processes, and communication gaps. The Bosch logo is at the bottom right corner.

A new, company-wide design process and UI system

At Experience One, our design-centric collaborative approach spearheaded massive internal changes at Bosch, where we ran stakeholder interviews, delivered workshops, and visualized process and journey maps in Stuttgart before driving UX efforts in Berlin alongside the UI and Visual Team. When Bosch and its partners approached us in 2018, they had over 100 different brand guidelines; to address this, we teamed up with Bosch's Corporate Design Division and Bosch.IO to create the Bosch Brand Guide – a centralized, digital hub built on the flexible SaaS platform Frontify, enabling seamless teamwork with its intuitive WYSIWYG interface. This platform not only harmonized design and development efforts to achieve a consistent web presence across Bosch’s many departments but also made brand guidelines accessible and user-friendly for designers, developers, product managers, and brand managers alike, ensuring global adoption and consistency across digital products and services, from landing pages and e-commerce sites to connected-home apps.

The image shows a detailed wireframe or design layout for a website, including UI elements, navigation menus, teaser sections, links, footer, and related page thumbnails.
Screenshots of Bosch DIY & Garden website pages showing various tools, garden projects, and articles.

Impact

Bosch is not only a power-tools sales giant. It now inspires and helps people realize their DIY dreams.

The new Bosch Home and Garden website really showcased the magic of putting users first. We made it easy to find products and services thanks to a new nav and semantic search system, refreshed the product taxonomy,  spruced up the content layout to make it even more engaging, and seamlessly blended in all the cool projects from our DIY communities in France, Germany and Italy. Plus, we brought in multiple product catalogs and some behind-the-scenes tech support like warranties, spare parts and personalized user subscriptions  to make it all run smoothly. The fresh new look was a long waiting makeover for the digital age. Traffic increased, back office operations run more efficiently, sales improved.

As consultants, the Bosch team at Experience One inspired the client to finally embrace a customer-centric approach.

A woman working outdoors with a Bosch cordless power saw on a wooden board in a garden with plants and flowers.
Screenshot of Bosch's DIY tools and home improvement webpage featuring a woman with a vintage tool chest, a man using cordless cordless drill, and images of DIY projects and hacks for home and garden.

Let's connect. I'm open for opportunities, freelance projects, or just to talk shop.

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