Team Building

Coming into a new team where their current leader wasn’t leaving the company but ‘asked to move over to another department’ is fraught with issues. Likewise, the team was completely lopsided with a heavy emphasis on back-end devs, mainly, because the core engine was built ad-hoc.

I needed to gain trust, build camaraderie, and find level ground. Fortunately, we had this project looming and the whole team knew the deadline. That proved to be the catalyst. The shared goalposts and need/belief that we can do this together was where I could get the team focused.

Finding strengths and weaknesses:
I needed to shift the weighting of skills or find multi-tool players because the front end was going to be 60% of the work. I really can’t emphasize this enough, this team was loaded, absolutely loaded with talent and intelligence. All I needed to provide was a small nudge and create some accountability and achievable milestones.

Strategy / Research / Sitemap

We needed a way to break this all into small chunks, as looking at it from the top was exhausting. Leaning on my FranklinCovey days we went with our Big Rocks / Little Rocks. We moved everything into Jira and established bi-weekly sprints with scrum happening every day at 10 am sharp (15 minutes tops). We already had lots of data to peruse through with four analytic engines running. The team (SEO, CRO, Front-end team, and me) poured through the data. Looking for our highest-performing pages and low-hanging fruit to kill.

I site-mapped the whole thing using Axure because we needed to identify the kill/keep pages and set up the proper redirects. I also conducted user interviews, surveys, and stakeholder consultations to understand the preferences, pain points, and requirements of the company's target audience, which included legal professionals, IT decision-makers, and potential investors.

Audience / Journey Maps

We had some pretty opaque customer profiles to work with. The profile wall that they had been using was about 30 strong so in order to find some key target profiles we huddled with the strategy team to make some larger groupings. We settled on Quality and Life Sciences buckets with sub-groupings under that. (QA Managers, Audit, etc)

We then worked through journey and experience mapping. I’ve been a huge fan of Adaptive Path(RIP) for years and have loved how they did their experience mapping. These artifacts were then socialized and made gospel for my team and around marketing.
I like to think people really noticed and used them as when you are building something this quick and this fast you have to really evangelize everything.

Visual Style

MasterControl already had a creative arm that handled collateral, events, and branding. They had been working on the brand guidelines for a bit, so we had some pieces to start with.

We had to also accommodate for the Global styling and coloring and how the logo lockup would look in various countries (Chinese was the big target market).

Typography was one place we wanted to put some energy around as we had to consider French, German, Spanish, and the hardest Chinese both Traditional and Mandarin. Typography can be a real sticking point with creatives but I always ere on the side of reducing eye strain and keeping page load down. When you bring the heavier “arty” fonts they can really impact speeds.

We went with Gotham as it struck a nice balance and still provided a clean look and feel.
Iconography was going to be very important, as we wanted to have markers and waypoints at every juncture.

Wire-Framing / Prototypes

Time was of the essence and we did most of the wire-framing whiteboard style with the front-end team huddled in a large war room going through the pages and experiences we knew we would need. The CMS would need to have drag-and-drop elements for different widgets making it easy and intuitive for non-technical people to build landing pages.

You need to account for the backed WYSIWYG and how much effort it’s going to take the team to build each unique component. Think every place that has a copy/image/button has to have a unique field with styling attached to it.

As we were wireframing we were also working on the naming conventions for each widget and the various variations. The naming architecture proved to be a formidable challenge but we eventually wrangled it. We created low-fidelity prototypes of the core pages - Home/Product/Solution/Landing page/Resource Center/Blog Article

UI Kits and Design System

I’m a true believer in Design Systems as it gives everyone a very defined set of rules and ways to think. Anything global you need constraints and boundaries to mitigate rules to help with development and scalability. MasterControl had never had a global design system so this took a bit of evangelizing and collaboration but in the end, everyone jumped on board.

My hero on this was my unicorn front-end developer Zak Porter who, while not having much UX experience, was incredibly coachable and willing to jump in. We built 75 unique widgets with 3 distinct variations of each - including header and nav - also accounting for 3 viewports and ran testing on 5 core browsers.