SMASHING BOXES
One of the funnest things I did when I was working at Smashing Boxes was to refresh the brand.
We wanted to create a website that was unique and creative, so I experienced with shades and dimension, plus some lighting and animation effects throughout the website.
THE UX PART:
Some of the things we kicked this project off were:
Information Architecture
What pages we had, what pages made sense, what needed updating. This exercise made us really think about how our new content should be structured and how we would approach guiding the user into reading and learning more about a subject. It also helped us think through what so many years worth of content could be leveraged into organizing things in the new website in a way that would be meaningful and made sense, and also, bringing in traffic and SEO brownie points, of course.
Analytics research
Where was our traffic coming from, why, what pages, what was our best content, our most followed content, who our customers are, where they were at, what type of business they were in, etc. Something that surprised us with this task was the amount of tech-related traffic we were getting, people looking for answers, advise on how to use different technologies. Gave us something to think about and place in the backlog in regards to new content creation and leveraging the amount of great talent we have in-house.
How did we want to curve the traffic if it wasn’t what we wanted.
A lot of the traffic we were getting was from employment-seeking folks. While we love that, and we want to foster bringing in new talent, the website should be a tool that primarily speaks to our to-be-customers and represents our experience. So, we needed to think through how to change this in a way that we could continue attracting talent, but also highlighting our work.
Persona creation.
This exercise was great and helped us find some hypothesis on how we could curve the traffic issue mentioned above, and helped us create a pretty beautiful Information Architecture.
User flows.
With the IA sorted, the user flows helped us finesse the experience design by leveraging how we organized our content and thought about our user’s end goals.
Competitive Research.
Yes, we looked at other agencies, from local, direct competitors to agencies that were across the pond and even places that were more on the marketing end of things vs the technical end. This really helped us understand how the business was addressing the needs and capturing leads. It was really interesting to see the different approaches, from bold graphic/design aspects that spoke for themselves to more curated and guided experiences.
This information helped us determine:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
