Modern, user-centered corporate design – iteration 3.0 release

Security Intelligence is an IBM sponsored blog and news site which has a high weekly publishing volume. Stakeholders requested a complete site redesign to better appeal to their target audiences and improve the user experience so users could navigate the site easily. They wanted to add a fun flair to differentiate from other similar sites in the market.

Pain points

In the last year, the SecurityIntelligence website style became outdated and missed the mark on web best practices. This led to poor site performance, a less than stellar user experience, difficulties updating or adding features and lower engagement rates. An outdated codebase, which was inherited last year from an external agency, left minimal room for improvements.

Website style was stale and dated. The client requested a professional modern take on a news site.
Site could not be customized or updated easily.
The code behind the scenes was not optimized, causing development team slow downs and slow load times.
High volume publishing led to an abundance of repetitive stock photography.

Solution

Our Agile Team decided that the best way to tackle all of these issues was to start from a blank slate. This large undertaking included an overhaul of the user experience and design, development of an entirely new WordPress site and migration to a new server. Our team project goals:

1. improve the design user experience to promote engagement and return visits.
2. improve pageload times, general site performance, compliance and accessibility
3. make it more efficient for our developers and digital strategists to work on in the future

The new site design is based on modular elements to be used over multiple pages. This strategy enabled us to adapt to the evolving needs of Security over time. These modules can be updated by editors on the fly instead of developers. It empowers strategists to make decisions based on data and editorial strategy quickly and iteratively.

Design focused on content organization and relying less on imagery. The new modules display more content above the fold and delineate a clear hierarchy to pages that would otherwise be confusing.

Our team also deployed new features such as a new mega menu, read time indications, on-site podcast streaming, CDN boost and Progressive Web App image caching and Google optimization.

Results are in

After the redesign debuted, we performed user testing to gain insight to what our users thought of the design. We asked them to perform specific tasks to check the user flow for future iterations and also asked what they thought of the “design experience”. 94% of those tested enjoyed the new visual design and interactive elements.

Other results, collected from our data analyst showed:

• Engagement rate for SecurityIntelligence.com jumped by 9 points, qualifying more visitors for retargeting in paid media campaigns
• Page load times decreased by 500% to 0.7 seconds due to the replacement of the old code and introduction of new server environments

Working agile

Our team fully embraced Agile, with ideas and contributions coming from every member. For example, developers offered design ideas, designers worked on user experience, we had daily technical member jam sessions and twice weekly timeline updates with our client.

Our internal cross-functional team demonstrated to our client that an internal team can radically improve user experience, engagement and performance beyond what an external vendor offered.