Páginas Amarelas website
The Why (Objectives)
The client
For this project, my team had an internal client; we were working at a large media company (the Portuguese Yellow Pages) who was faced with the inevitable business model change following the accelerating decline of printed directories in the early 2000’s. The company was now (early 2015)investing almost exclusively in the online business and defined itself as “the largest digital marketing player in Portugal” based on its huge client base and very large revenues.
The client’s problems
Our team had been integrated in the company as a way of entering the custom websites creation business and the company’s own corporate website was extremely outdated and lacking important information about the current products and services offered by the company. We were approached by higher management in order to undertake the renovation of said website.
The client’s objectives
The client had two main goals:
- Build on its currently strong brand awareness and improve the online brand image quality in alignment with the target audience’s needs and expectations;
- Generate business leads and increase sales through multiple online channels.
The How (process)
Our Starting point
I started by analysing the (sparse on information) briefing/email I receivedin order to kickstart the project with my team. It simply stated the necessityto create two new websites, the first one would be a commercial website,comprising all the necessary information about the current product offer;the second one would be institutional, containing information related to thehistory, mission and vision of the company.
The importance of proper UX
I took a step back and tried to identify our target audience and what couldbe their goals and needs. It was deemed unviable and unwelcome for ourteam to directly interview the end users (our company’s customers andpotential customers), so I chose to interview the sales reps and accounts,which were in direct contact with our clients and potential clients. I evenaccompanied them to some business meetings, gaining valuable insightsabout our target audience and typical user.At the same time, I led our team’s internal meetings, trying to get everyone(designers, developers and copywriters) to contribute with ideas and toorganize them into possible user goals, user needs, assumptions andconstraints.I then tried to convince the higher management team of the importanceof doing proper user analysis, market research and spending dome timedefining the overall digital strategy of the company
Loosing a battle, winning the war
Although I was quite successful in advocating the use of User Centred design practices, I felt short on the task of being given the resources to properly define a global strategy, meaning I wasn’t able to define business goals and rules, KPIs, to develop ecosystem maps and to think of the problem in more broader sense. In hindsight, I think everyone now agrees that it would have been much more helpful, specially given that we were later asked - bit by bit - to implement parts of that idea of a broader communication strategy (landing pages, email marketing campaigns and customer engagement tools, an internal CRM and ERP, etc.). We accepted the victory I had with the UX focused approach and gave up on the small battle we felt we had lost regarding the broader strategy, instead concentrating on fighting the rest of the ‘war’ itself.
Low-fi, High-fi... and then repeat
The team started producing wireframes, which eventually led to quick guidelines regarding the content production (which was to be produced by another team inside the company) and I started collecting content proposals, reformulating them and feeding them with the design team. Unfortunately, and although I had tried to collect as much feedback as I could during the lower-fidelity wire-framing phase (and stressing out that failing to do so would make us lose valuable time in all subsequent phases), we had to go through a lot of iterations while in the high-fidelity design, and even in the development, phases. I was responsible for setting up and maintaining this process of ideation and iteration in inVision which facilitated not only the communication with remote team mates and other stakeholders but also, and more importantly, the recording and compartmentalisation of all the feedback.
The What (product)
The website
I think this project could have been about more than just a website.Nevertheless, I feel the website itself completely fulfils the brief, clearlycommunicating the entire product line (which spans across the 5 stages ofdigital marketing) to the target audience.
Refining the what... modular style
I was responsible for receiving feedback and usage metrics about thewebsite, comparing them against our KPIs and leading the refinementprocess. We quickly identified some simple pain points, such as an outdatedand subpar logo and poorly contrasting colours and acted accordingly,redefining the logo and color scheme while maintaining brand consistency.There were also other - more complex - very apparent bottlenecks, suchas inflexible and hard to navigate main and sub menus. We’re currently inthe process of redesigning and improving those elements.Fortunately I had managed to convince the designers and developers toadopt a (“atomic-design” based) modular approach, supported by a livingstyle guide. That meant we were able to iterate and modify our designmuch more quickly than if we had opted for a traditional deliverables basedapproach.
Building on the what
Soon after the deployment of the website the inbound marketingdepartment started asking us to develop a number of landing pages, emailmarketing campaigns and search and display ads. Unfortunately, by thattime it wasn’t feasible to incorporate those requests in the present projectand I ended up making the decision of creating a separate project for them;feel free to dive into more detail about it in the next case study.
