“Tell me more about your process”, is a popular question asked during interviews and I suppose any conversation with interested enough parties. I normally try and answer this without sounding as generic as the next guy, and most of the time just settle on one or two examples of projects I have worked on in the past. As the requirements for different projects are, well, different - so too is the process followed. Below is an example of my process for re-designing the marketing website at Wetu.
It started with a survey, which was put out a month or so before I joined, asking users what they thought of our products and services. Out of the 40 participants, a very high number came back with positive results, “We just love it!” But, this was not reflected in the amount of traffic we had to the site each month and the very low conversion rate amongst new visitors.
If everyone that users our products loves them, why are we struggling to get new customers?
The first version of the site was live for 7 years and was an endless pit of confusion for everyone that visited it. The biggest problem was, we had almost no signups for trials to the Itinerary software that came directly from the website. Users that did get onto a trial eventually, ended up on our contact page and just called our sales team to find out more. The rest of them - lost opportunities 🙁
I would be the first designer of any kind to join the team, and before making things pretty (usual assumption by stakeholders when a designer joins the team), I needed to understand our users (what did they expect the from the product) and I needed to understand the business (what are were the business goals for the product). To do this we’d need to create a culture of designing and building products for and always our users in mind - I would need to shake things up a bit.
Bring on my first challenge, which was getting stakeholders buy-in to the idea of research with real users - the very job I was hired for.
Wetu Marketing Site Re-design
Just to give you an indication of what went into the planning stages:
Discovering Wetus Goals
- Understanding the Purpose, Goals and Vision of the business;
Understanding the industry
- Research and discovery, competitor analysis;
Who are our customers?
- Using analytics and user insights from internal resources;
- Field Studies, surveys, interviews, articles written by experts;
- I interviewed 70% of the staff to get their understanding of who our customers are and since the travel industry is very much about who you know, they shed light on the relationships they had with our clients.
In order for me to gain enough insight into each of the above points, I created a project plan, which I presented in the Gantt chart below:
Note: Although not extremely legible, this Gantt is just a representation of the different stages of the Re-design; the parts that make up each stage; and a rough estimation of how long each section would take me to get through.
Two parts of the project that took the most time:
Provisional Persona Creation and Analysis took about +- 3 weeks
Create Personas (keeping company goals in mind)
Interviews (Internal experts)
Matched variables against spectra
Analyse
Establish user goals
Create the personas
Visually represent and introduce to the staff
Need finding
User stories
Scenarios
Storyboards (will use to help introduce the personas by scenario)
Information Architecture (Sitemap)
Content Planning (content matrix design)
Individual Ideation (keep in mind engagement tactics)
Engagement Analysis
Group Ideation (Friday staff meeting)
User flows
Note: I am fully aware that there are parties in play right now at war with the thought of Personas being the be-all-and-end-all in crafting solutions to problems users face simply by defining their demographics and and. Although at this time in 2015 I was not using the framework (nor had I heard of) Jobs-to-be-done or JTBD - I had been working as an Interaction Designer for a number of years and been a problem solver well, for all my other years. The personas were merely our first piece of design collateral (bonus that I could engage the entire team in the preparation thereof) and an opportunity to early on create empathy amongst team members and stakeholders for our users.
Next phase: 2 weeks
Sketching both Mobile and Desktop (layout copy and other content)
Lo-fi Prototyping (Usability test with internal and external users)
Walkthrough design concepts (factor in navigational demands)
Heuristic Evaluation (3 to 5 experts, questions, the explanation for functions, not present)
Approve Designs (stakeholders)
At the beginning of my UX journey, I found out about Cores and Paths, and since then I find its a great way to start any project, to get a clear idea of your core, and how users can navigate to and from it.
During the research phase, I found that our biggest problem could simply be that we were not explaining our product clearly and simply enough to prospective customers. With this in mind, I ran a Group Ideation session with the entire staff to get their input on how we could better explain who are and what problem our product solved, to new users visiting our website.
Group Ideation PDF (example)
Along with the persona creation, the information gathered here made it crystal clear, we had two very different users that wanted and were looking out for different things. We were not only displaying one thing terribly, we were muddling information, which helped neither of our users and made information scent near very difficult.
During the Group Ideation session, with the help of a few teammates, we took time to introduce the rest of the team to the personas, and through scenarios (sketched on storyboards) and the accompanying stories we told, we began to build empathy for our users.
Next, I created a few sketched-out mockups and then paper prototypes which I tested internally with both stakeholders and the entire staff. This part again gets me additional eyes on my work, more feedback, and involves the team in the design process, win-win-win! We went through one more iteration doing usability tests in-between, which proved extremely useful.
After this valuable exercise, I ran a card sorting session with just 5 users and got enough of an idea to create our desired user flows and build out our new information architecture.
From this…
To this…
Taking into account everything I had learned up to this point, about the industry, our users and the experts in this field - I was able to put together the third iteration of slightly higher fidelity mockups, which I then tested with real users.
What we discovered was that by splitting the homepage into two columns, left for “Operators”; and right for “Suppliers” we were able to give them each their own entire experience. Building the site differently (infrastructure) also allowed us to market those streams more effectively and allowed users to come through search engines or any other sources directly to a page designed just for them, sans confusing technical jargon and the other fluff we promoted before.
The next step was to find 3 or 4 suitable engagement tactics (psychology of persuasion) to keep users interested.
After this, I had just less than 2 weeks to complete the hi-def designs for the new improved responsive Wetu marketing site.
Post launch
After 3 months of checks and tweaks and constantly observing users interacting with the site, registrations for trials on the website went up 40% and sales reported that the users that had called to enquire were better informed about the products on offer than previously.
Hotjar screenshot post launch
The stakeholders were very pleased with the results of the change and so were our users (well, new ones might not have known anything was different, but you get the point). I was happy my first project went better than I had expected, but more than users being able to register for trials directly from the marketing site, through this project I had gained the trust of my CEO, head of product and head of development and would have their backing/blessing to do more research projects. This helped me make more informed decisions across all future projects, from small quick-win features to larger core changing enhancements.
Please note that due to the sensitive nature of the documents, designs and procedures used during my time at Wetu, I have omitted certain artefacts. I think this gives a decent understanding of the process I followed and I would be more than willing to chat in more detail about this in person.
Edit: 5 years later and with a larger team now running design at Wetu, the marketing site although differently styled still boasts the two-column layout and simple navigation - https://wetu.com/
Thanks for reading
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