The Client: A well-known children’s publishing company.

The Project: Develop a strategy and vision for a new version of the parent-facing site that would communicate the relevance for parents of the company’s content, tools, and products. Move the site away from a typical “lifestyle” site for parents, with recipes and baby name guides, to a site that better reflected the company’s established expertise in reading and learning. Find a “killer app” or tool that would promote repeat visits and increased page views. We were also asked to reuse components of the recently redesigned teacher-facing site where appropriate and leverage as many of its Drupal content types and templates as possible.

The Approach: With a limited budget, I reviewed existing market and demographic research, site analytics, and competitors’ Websites to develop an understanding of the audience and their needs. I developed ad-hoc personas to guide our design strategy (which we captured in a document that was shared with the business team and executive sponsors) and inform the selection of new tools and features. In partnership with the creative director and visual designer, I created high-level conceptual wireframes that included an age-based “quick search” tool geared toward revealing relevant content at a single click, making the site feel both content-rich and personalized. With additional personalization planned for future phases, I designed a framework for notifications and other tools for registered users. The redesign is still in progress.

The Client: The legal research division of one of the world’s largest financial information services companies.

The Project: In response to user feedback that suggested the company’s new legal research product was difficult to use because of constraints imposed by its Flash-based design, we were asked to redo the site in HTML and to make it feel more like a Website than an application. Initially, limited changes to existing functionality were planned, but the change in technology necessitated some functional and design changes, and the client decided to add some new features and enhancements while we were reworking the design. The product also needed a way to stand out in a marketplace dominated by two established players.

The Challenges: A planned one-to-one mapping of the Flash site to HTML turned into an opportunity to improve some functionality but also required us to rethink parts of the experience in order to avoid losing functionality that the Flash site offered. Additionally, changes in senior leadership during the course of the project meant a change in the vision for the product. The differentiating “hook” that the business team decided on initially was to offer users the option to filter the available legal research through the lens of a user-selected practice specialty. We designed the product accordingly, with the understanding that the user’s view of each product within the offering would change depending on which legal specialty they chose. This turned out not to be sustainable throughout the site, however; that is, there were individual products within the site for which a specialty-based lens would not change the product view and would, in fact, cause confusion. As a result, we were forced to rethink site structure and navigation multiple times before the product launched.

The Approach: We needed to find a way to implement the basic concept of the practice-specific filter without forcing it onto products within the site where it wouldn’t add value and could cause user confusion. Over the course of several months and a number of reworkings of the site navigation, we came up with a simplified, unobtrusive approach that allowed the user to choose a practice-specific filter where relevant without making it the main guiding principle of the site. We designed the filter in a way that would scale, so that as the client’s offering of practice-specific content expands, they will be able to promote the filter more prominently. The site launched successfully with our approach in place.

The Project:
We were tasked with redesigning the agency’s main intranet site in order to create a corporate resource that would also serve as a gateway to the company’s several digital asset management systems. In particular, we were asked to improve content findability and perceived value as well as to strengthen branding and identity for the intranet. In interviews with both maintainers and users of the intranet and related sites, we discovered that workflow was not well defined and inconsistently observed, so improving workflow and content governance became an additional goal for the project.

Example wireframe for the Intranet project. Created in Adobe InDesign.

The Challenges:
The corporate intranet itself contained a wealth of valuable information, but it was poorly organized and difficult to find, requiring employees to wade through vast numbers of links and long, uncategorized dropdown lists. Inconsistencies in terminology use within the company were reflected on the site.

We were able to redesign only the portal itself; because of budget, time, and technology constraints, we could not implement a single content and digital asset management solution, and finding a way to mitigate this was a significant challenge.

The Approach:
In the absence of direct access to users, we conducted a task brainstorm with key stakeholders and audience subject matter experts (SMEs) to capture all the tasks related to offline and online interactions with the company and its venues.

I used the list of tasks to develop assumptive task-based audience segments, which allowed the client to begin identifying the priority segments they would target for the redesign initiative. These segments were used as a basis for recruitment for a full-scale user research process; they served as the foundation for that process and were validated and refined based on interviews with real users.

The Client:
A large-scale consumer-facing site for an industry-leading group of entertainment venues.

The Project:
In preparation for a full site redesign, we undertook a number of discovery activities to determine the framework and scope that such a large-scale redesign would require. A significant goal of the redesign was to improve retention in the company’s loyalty program both by improving the usability and design of the online component of the program and by targeting the program more effectively to the relevant audience segments.

The Challenges:

In order to establish the approach that a redesign would take, we needed to understand the company’s audience, both online and offline. The company had extensive demographic data about its audience but knew little about its customers’ needs or online activities, and it was unwilling to invest in user research without being convinced that the research would have value.

The Approach:
In the absence of direct access to users, we conducted a task brainstorm with key stakeholders and audience subject matter experts (SMEs) to capture all the tasks related to offline and online interactions with the company and its venues.

I used the list of tasks to develop assumptive task-based audience segments, which allowed the client to begin identifying the priority segments they would target for the redesign initiative. These segments were used as a basis for recruitment for a full-scale user research process; they served as the foundation for that process and were validated and refined based on interviews with real users.

Persona overview
Persona profile
Scenario
Public site content matrix
Subscription site wireframe

The Client:

An established nonprofit medical research company with a public-facing Website and numerous subscription-only Websites associated with offline products.

The Project:
Our initial assignment was to update the site design and create a standardized look and feel to be applied across the public site and all subscription-only sites, while still maintaining the individual branding of those sites. Secondarily, the redesign was expected to help improve the company’s declining membership retention rates.

The Challenges:

• The public-facing site was relatively straightforward, though dated and unattractive. But it did a poor job of explaining the subscription model and the individual products. The homepage was unfocused and did not clearly articulate the company’s purpose and mission. Because most of the company’s revenue came from its subscription product, the public site seemed like an afterthought, and opportunities to use it as a sales tool and market differentiator were lost.
• Each subscription product had its own Website with its own UI, and similar tasks were accomplished in widely varying ways on each site. But most subscribers used multiple products on a regular basis, which made for a disjointed and often confusing user experience. The client wanted to maintain the individual branding of each site but also needed an overarching look and feel that all subscription sites would share.
• Subscription sites were managed by teams with varying levels of technical expertise, and there was no standardization or centralized control. As a result, some sites were relatively sophisticated, with advanced tools and functionality, while others were created using Microsoft Word’s "save as HTML" feature and had only bare-bones capabilities. Each required a separate sign-on, and most had little apparent connection to the parent site. Site managers were highly territorial and resistant to any suggestions for change.

The Approach:
We interviewed a mix of new and longtime users of the subscription products and derived audience segment types, then created personas and scenarios for the three segments identified as business priorities. This enabled us to streamline the experience of daily access to multiple subscription products and helped us achieve a reasonable degree of consensus among the different client constituencies.

Keeping the needs of the primary personas at the forefront, we created a new look and feel that unified the public site and all of the subscription sites to strengthen the parent brand, without abandoning the distinctive identities of each site. We implemented a single sign-on process and created a path that allowed frequent users quick access to their products, as well as a path for newer users that helped them understand the depth and breadth of the company’s offering.

Homepage wireframe
Secondary page wireframe
Sitemap

The Client:

A subsidiary of one of the world’s largest retailers.

The Project:
We were asked to create a content-focused microsite to showcase the client’s environmental initiatives.

The Challenges:

Although the subject matter was very important to the client, the business goals for the microsite were vague and kept shifting. Initially, the client wanted a purely informational site with no commerce component, but they had no strategy or budget for promoting the site and were unclear on how to integrate it into their existing e-commerce site. The client had clearly defined corporate principles and goals for improving its environmental sustainability, but they had not considered how to make these goals relevant for users.

Additionally, the e-commerce site was undergoing a major redesign (also led by VML), but the microsite was scheduled to launch months before the new e-commerce site. We had to make the microsite compatible in overall experience with both the existing site and the redesign. After some delays on the client side, we were left with a very short turnaround time for the microsite, and when we began work, our design brief was still unclear.

The Approach
By focusing on customer needs and leveraging the company’s own user research, we demonstrated that a content-only site would not have value for the typical site customer and would likely receive very limited traffic. Thus, we were able to convince the client that it would be best to include a commerce component in order to make the microsite a destination and give users a reason to visit.

We developed a design and messaging strategy that supported the corporate goals and translated them into user-facing concepts. Aligning the customers’ interest in buying environmentally friendly products with corporate sustainability goals, we defined a unifying design principle and created a compelling experience that customers can use to shop or simply to learn more about environmentally beneficial product choices.

The Client:

A subsidiary of one of the world’s largest retailers.

The Project:
As part of an overall site redesign, we were asked to redo the taxonomy for the product catalog, which contains many thousands of products in an unusually wide range of categories.

The Challenges:

The taxonomy had been developed ad hoc by in-house staff without any training in categorization or information architecture. For some categories, the taxonomy was based heavily on taxonomies used by industry leaders in that category, without taking into account that the category leaders often sold nothing but the products in their specialized category and thus had a much more targeted catalog that required a very different level of specificity from that of our generalist client.

Nonstandard terminology was used in many cases, making it difficult for users to find specific products, and there was no vocabulary control, meaning that the same item might get called two different things depending on where it appeared. In many instances, a user might click down through multiple layers of subcategories to arrive at three or four products (or even just one), without having been given any sense of what they would find at the end of the trail. The client had implemented a sophisticated tool for enhancing navigation by using facets (product attributes, e.g. size and color for clothing) to allow users to filter their search or browse results. They had not been trained in the use of this tool, however, and had implemented it correctly, mixing broad categories with highly granular facets. The taxonomy was also significantly influenced by the business objectives of product managers and buyers, and we needed to find a way to balance those business needs with logical principles of categorization and, more important, the information-seeking habits and goals of users.

The net result of these issues was to make the taxonomy disjointed and confusing, which in turn made the shopping experience frustrating, especially compared to the experience provided by other leading online retailers.

The Approach
We documented the existing taxonomy and identified the major errors with it. Without direct access to users to use as test subjects for card sorts and other taxonomy research, we instead reviewed best-in-class e-commerce sites; reviewed search logs and failed-search data; and ran term extraction software on sample pages in the product catalog. Working closely with the UX lead on the project, I combined those findings to come up with standardized terminology and a manageable, easily scanned, yet still comprehensive set of top-level categories. We then met with client stakeholders to refine those categories so that they reflected business priorities.

Work continues on refining subcategories based on product manager input and business goals. We worked to educate the client’s taxonomy managers in the basics of categorization and the best use of facets for enhanced navigation. Our hope is that as the product catalog grows and changes, the in-house staff will now be able to create new categories that reflect both a well-reasoned taxonomic structure and one that effectively supports the way online shoppers look for products and information.