Workplace Consulting Website

Project overview

A highly respected, but smaller, workplace/leadership consulting firm, working mainly with innovation-oriented companies, was looking to replace their “standard” website with one that better reflected their own fun and innovative side. They still needed to showcase their experience and industry thought leadership, but they needed to do so in a way that no longer came across as “the same as everyone else out there”.

The content strategist for the project and I collaborated to plan and run a discovery workshop to tease out their target audiences, understand their long-term business objectives, learn actions the website should support, and get to know them as company.

Experience brief

To confirm that we had correctly identified the goals, and to make sure we had aligned our vision with the company’s, we prepared a website experience brief, including objectives, design principles, messaging strategy, a website structure model, and proposed conversion paths for their website visitors.

One of our key experience goals was for all content to relate to the primary “challenges” that they help other companies navigate, and for users to be able to access content either starting with these challenges or by filtering the type of content by these challenges.

Sitemap

Our site map evolved through several versions as we collaborated with the client team members to refine the vision for how they positioned themselves on the web, and how that positioning got reflected in the primary navigation.

For example, after a first round, they decided that they didn’t want to appear so “training” oriented, but did want to elevate “public workshops”, since that audience was different from their consulting audience.

Sketches

Trying to stay as nimble as possible with the design process, and get early feedback from the client, the team started with a collaborative sketching session, then I took a couple of the screens and refined the sketches to present preliminary concepts to the client before we dove into wireframes.

Despite the client’s initial hesitation at the rough nature of the sketches, by the end of the presentation, we got exactly the kind of feedback we needed to move to the medium-fidelity wireframes.

Wireframes

Because the site was going to be responsive, and implemented into Drupal, I tried to keep the designed as modular as possible, providing straightforward paths for content to flow on various different screen sizes once they determined the priorities. I also tried to prompt tactile interactions as much as possible, for those accessing the site on mobile phones or tablets.

By the time we presented wireframes, the client was already familiar with our concept, so they were able to really use their feedback to dig into the deeper questions of how each of the templates we were presenting met their goals, and what calls-to-action were best-suited to each type of page.

The wireframes facilitated their internal discussions about content, and helped them focus for the task ahead of them as we proceeded through design and development.