2014–today
Honda Research Institute USA: a front door for students, professors and partners, with datasets on request
A graduate student deciding where to apply, a professor looking for an industry partner, a researcher who needs a driving dataset: usa.honda-ri.com is where they meet Honda Research Institute USA. We designed and built the site in 2014–2015, moved it to Liferay in 2018, redesigned it in 2021, and replaced the email process for requesting HRI’s datasets with an online request and download. We still run it in 2026.
- 16
- HRI datasets researchers can request on the site (September 2026)
- 2014
- first site designed; we still run it in 2026
- Client
- Honda Research Institute
- Industry
- Automotive
- Scope
- UX research · Website design & build · Platform migration · Dataset request app · Managed support
- Platform
- Liferay · AWS
- Partnership
- 2014–today
Challenge
When we designed the first usa.honda-ri.com in 2014, we wrote down who it was for. A graduate student looking for a first research job, with little to go on, for whom the first impression of the site counts a lot. A professor who wants an industry partner and is building a spreadsheet of options, and will move on if the information is not easy to find. A researcher at Honda in Japan who may not read English fluently and needs HRI’s work presented clearly.
Later, HRI started publishing driving datasets for university research. Getting one meant emailing HRI, signing an agreement and waiting while someone reviewed the request and emailed the download links back. For HRI it meant reviewing every request by hand; for the researcher, waiting on an inbox.
Approach
A site built around the people who look for HRI
We designed the first site from personas like these, with research areas, projects, publications, researcher profiles, careers, news and events as content HRI’s own team could publish, and guides for its editors. It launched in 2015.
Moved to Liferay without losing the site
In 2018 the public SharePoint Online service the site ran on was being retired. We moved it to Liferay, kept its design and structure, carried every section across, set up SEO and author roles, and trained HRI’s editors.
Datasets on request, without the email chain
In 2020 we replaced the email process with an online request: a form that captures the requester’s details and the sharing agreement, checks the university email address and location against the dataset’s rules, and sends a download link to the files on AWS, with a report of every request for HRI. In 2023 we rebuilt it on Liferay Objects: requests that meet the rules are approved automatically, and each download link expires.
A redesign, then steady improvement
In 2021 we redesigned the site in line with HRI’s global brand, organized the research by scientific domain and research area, added structured data for search engines and a job application form, and checked it for accessibility on desktop and mobile. Since then we upgraded it to Liferay 7.4 (2021) and rebuilt the slow Publications page on Elasticsearch, with filters by year, scientific domain and research area (2022).
Impact
In September 2026, usa.honda-ri.com lists 16 HRI datasets, from the 104 hours of Bay Area driving in the HRI Driving Dataset to newer releases. A researcher at a university requests one with their university email and, when the request meets the dataset’s rules, receives a download link by email, with no one at HRI handling it by hand.
The site we built in 2015 is still HRI USA’s front door, redesigned and upgraded rather than replaced, and we have supported it under an application management and support agreement since 2020.
