Web Design

Location: New York City

Work: 30% onsite 70% remote

Platform: Web

Industry: Business Process Outsourcing

Team

  • Web UX Designer (me)

  • Full Stack Engineer

  • 3 Client Product Owners

Skills

  • Stakeholder management

  • Branding

  • Web design

  • Information architecture

  • Collaborative live design

Outcomes

  • Increased sales leads

  • SEO

Phase I

Canon’s business process services arm needed a new design for their website. Because of the broad range of services they offer, large amounts of information needed to be made available without crowding experience. I was part of a team consisting of myself and two developers. The client had previously hired an agency to design and develop the site but the project did not go well and was very expensive, leaving the client feeling apprehensive at the thought of another attempt.

I needed to first gain their confidence and trust before getting started. To ensure this project would be different, I explained my design process and together we spent some time casually looking through other websites, talking about features we liked and jotting them down. We came up with three words that would characterize the new site’s look and feel. We reviewed business requirements and came up with a timeline for the project. I held daily review and design sessions with stakeholders and developers together to ensure project moved along quickly with no surprises. Proposed designs were reviewed, checked against our three words, signed off on and released to developers regularly. I developed a style guide and component library to keep everything consistent and manageable. The client felt comfortable and in control and we had a lot of fun working together in the process.

Phase II… 5 years later

I had left my job and moved to London where I worked as freelancer. Canon got in touch saying it was time for another refresh, we had such a good time working together, let’s do it again!

Together we ran through some similar exercises from the first engagement and came up with a new visual identity. I reconfigured some of the existing modular design elements, which saved some effort on the development side, and created a few new ones. 

We reviewed the analytics to see where users were dropping and areas of the site that were not getting traffic, then used this to come up with a new architecture for the sitemap and navigation.

Information Architecture

How many different types of large businesses are out there? What kinds of processes do they need to manage? Try to answer these questions and you get a sense for how much content needs to live on this website. The challenge was keeping it close to the surface without overwhelming the user.

Navigtion

We developed a flexible navigation that made each high-level topic a new experience offering inspirational messaging, imagery and links to featured content. This kept the site feeling light and interesting but still scalable.

SEO

The themes in the navigation were carried over throughout the site. The inspirational messaging enabled strong keywords to be set in headline text without feeling awkward. Internal links for featured content and suggested case studies strengthened the site taxonomy boosting SEO performance. All images included their alternative text and corresponded with content on the page further enhancing indexing performance.

Results

The site went live on time and within budget, fulfilling all requirements. The company saw a significant increase in new business as a result of the new online presence and improved SEO. Everyone lived happily ever-after.