Unified web ecosystem: One experience to rule them all
Summary: Initiated project concept, identified and brought stakeholders together, identified target audience, initiated analytics into process, and optimized critical path performance.
Challenges:
- bringing together siloed departments and stakeholders,
- changing the company mental model from disparate sites to a unified web ecosystem,
- helping stakeholders understand the target audience and current market,
- initiating analytics into the process and building dashboards,
- search optimization,
- load performance optimization,
- distributed team and stakeholders across 3 countries with many remote employees
- last-minute re-branding
Process & methodologies:
- persona-based storyboard walkthroughs
- usability tests
- unify information architecture
- plan responsive design strategy and educate stakeholders
- create & groom backlog; plan sprints
- help plan roadmap
- keep dev team motivated & happy
- iterative prototypes
- Agile methodology
- global search
- performance optimization
- Agile methodology
Tools: Axure, Illustrator, Sketch, InVision
What we wanted: Unified web ecosystem with one profile, quick top navigation, section indicator, contextual main navigation and sign in either going to customer portal or giving user choice of customer portal or stay on corporate homepage, global and optimized search, optimized performance
Where we got to: Unified web ecosystem with one profile, one layer of unchanging navigation and sign in staying on corporate homepage. I've created a search optimization plan and performance optimization plan and we're in the process of this next phase. We're also in the process of adding a marketplace and community.
Storyboarding - a good cartoon brings people together
I storyboarded the main use cases for our personas: search from Google, search from corporate homepage, search from docs, and search from support
Clear navigation via a top nav and contextual nav
The new customer portal provides a clear call-to-action to get users to sign up, bringing forth the value of what they get when they do.
Always know where you are
Users can quickly find the relevant information they need for any product, while still being able to access other parts of the web ecosystem.
Unified navigation across web ecosystem
Users can get to any other part of the Axway web ecosystem via the top navigation. The secondary navigation enables them to navigate only within the selected area, in this case, Support.
Responsive design
Iterative design: Customer portal earlier concept
Architecting the solution
I planned out the site, mapped the task flows, and created a model to show access privileges for each persona:
Mega-menus to remove the mystery from navigation
One signup and sign in experience to access any authenticated areas
Mobile access
I provided critical functionality, including case management, in the mobile experience.
Where we got to:
What was in the pipeline: global search, marketplace, and much more
