Hyundai
Recall Response
A legally-mandated site where the challenge wasn’t creativity — it was getting every fact exactly right.
A legal obligation, not a brand play.
A recall centered on vehicles’ fuel-economy ratings meant one requirement: get a site up — fast — that carried everything an affected owner needed to know and do. It was branded as Hyundai’s “MPG Information” hub.
The official, single source of truth for a fuel-economy recall — the nature of the recall, eligibility, and the required next steps.
Not a marketing site. Not a conversion funnel. The content — and getting it right — mattered more than anything else on the page.
One job: fully informed, immediately.
The desired outcome was clean and singular. No KPIs were defined for my part — success wasn’t a conversion number. It was accuracy, completeness, and clarity under pressure.
Any affected owner should arrive and immediately get what the recall was, whether it applied to them, and the steps to take — everything, in one place.
Owners need to be fully and correctly informed so they can make good decisions about what to do next. Every structural choice served that one belief.
Designing under legal oversight.
Legally-mandated content, real owners, real money on the line. Most of the site’s requirements were dictated directly by Hyundai’s legal team, aligned to federal NHTSA rules for what a recall site must present.
Understand the law first.
Before designing anything, I had to fully understand exactly what had to appear on the site — and how.
Everything through the AM.
The account manager carried legal’s requirements to me. Every assumption I made had to be cleared through legal before it could stand.
Accompanied by lawyers.
Reviewers stayed close throughout. Given the stakes, there was almost no room for a risky assumption — and that was correct.
The feedback was a gift.
At first, the sheer amount of oversight on what and howI designed felt constraining — I’d come from environments with more creative latitude. Then I noticed every piece of feedback was direct and purposeful — never vague, never taste-based bikeshedding. It was all in service of getting a high-stakes thing right. So I got out of my own way and let the oversight do its job.
The constraints weren’t the enemy. They were the spec.
Stop defending your choices. Start serving the requirement.
The most urgent question, one click away.
The header carried search and a can’t-miss “Do I qualify?”CTA on every page, so an owner’s first, most urgent question was always one click away.
01 Priority documents
Official Statement · Letter to Customer · Fact Sheets.
02 Distinct voices
Opinion-leader, customer, and a running News zone — kept separate.
03 Persistent search
A header search field present on every page.
Six pages, one consistent system.
Beyond the home page, I wireframed the full template set the site needed — six pages in all. Interior pages shared one consistent template — a left-hand sub-section nav beside a main content block — so every section read the same way. Annotated, brainstorm through hi-fi, produced fast and cleared through legal.
Priority docs, nav, search & “Do I qualify?”
Reusable interior template: sub-nav + content.
Press updates as a grid of dated cards.
Reimbursement example + calculator.
Recurring questions in Q&A format.
Call center, email, mail + press contact.
Turning a legal obligation into a real number.
For an MPG recall, the question underneath “Do I qualify?” is “what am I owed?” So Compensation earned its own dedicated page — a Reimbursement Example and a Reimbursement Calculator — so an affected owner could understand exactly what they were owed.
What shipped is what I made, cleared and correct.
What I contributed was concrete and real — produced fast, and cleared through legal review.
- The information architecture for the recall response site
- Six annotated wireframes — brainstorm & sketch through hi-fi
- Produced fast, and cleared through legal review
I left for a long-term contract elsewhere before launch, so I don’t know the shipped site’s final outcome or how the wireframes evolved. No conversion metric was ever mine to claim — and I won’t invent one.
Heavy oversight isn’t a creativity tax. On the things that truly matter, it’s clarity.
There’s no margin to be sloppy with a fact when a legal team, federal requirements, and worried owners all depend on it. When feedback is direct and purposeful, it’s a gift — and the fastest way through is to stop defending your choices and start serving the requirement.Treating constraints as the real brief is something I’ve carried into every high-stakes project since.