Goal: Create page templates with the aim of reusability and consistency.
UX Design
UI Design
UX Architecture
UX Research
Business Analytics
Requirements CMS
Content Strategy
Sitecore 7
Zeplin
Sketch
Confluence
Frontefy
6 months
This project initially started with the assignment to create page templates for the website of Knab Bank. The core focus of the improved templates is increased consistency as well as the ability of faster creation of webpages. I was asked to create the templates in the CMS system (Sitecore) using the current components. In this way Content Marketeers could use them directly, which saved time and we did not need any development capacity.
Was this all I did? Not quite. So, let me tell you the whole story.
In the current situation a generic component was used for a lot of different purposes in the CMS. This is why inconsistencies starting to show like differences in icons, spacing, color use and font sizes.
The research phase begins. I am always excited about this part of the process. It is like solving a puzzle game. And I love solving them (my guilty pleasure). You start without knowing with what you end up. You walk around, observe, talk to people, gather information, combine it all, and start to see patterns and solutions. A sufficient number of sources is key to crack a code, and you need other people to help you with it.
Designing has a similar process. Gathering information, from not only users but also from a lot of different departments of the company is important to me. Why? They are the ones that need to build it, use it, or prioritize your solution.
I am a strong believer in a Content First approach. This is why I started by inviting (potential) users into our UX Lab with the aim of knowing which content to include on each template. Some on the different people I talked to, were customers of Knab, did know a bit about Knab or has not even heard from them at all.
For the first phase of testing, the goal was to ask testers to create a storyline when choosing a bank product. First I divided the content which is currently available on the website of Knab over 30 different cards. I also added 10 new, some radical pieces in there, to see if they were triggered by that. They also had the option to create their own cards. I asked them to choose the most important pieces of content when choosing a bank product, put them in order and give them points of importantness. In this way the tester created their own prioritized story.
In the second part of the test, users got the test scenario of buying a bank product of Knab, with the aim of finding out the current pain points.
I also made an inquiry at the service-desk. Why do people call? What are the main problems (potential) clients have? What are the main solutions? What kind of compliments do we get? What are the critics? All interesting insights for the pages.
Speaking to the CRO Specialist gave interesting insights. Getting everyone on board and collecting different opinions and information during a project is something I find really important.
Content Marketeers are important stakeholders to talk to. They are the ones using the templates at the end. Based on their needs and current pain points, I mapped out the the steps to create a new page.
I wanted to know more about the process and possibilities for me of adding styling or components to the CMS. There was not much development capacity for this project, so I wanted to know what I could do within the boundaries.
After talking to all the relevant departments, like Development and Content, I found out that the current way of creating pages is not the most ideal way. To work faster and more consistent, we need to invest time to reconstruct the components and content in the CMS before creating the templates. I asked my manager for more time and another approach, and he agreed on that.
A new team was born, consisting of a Back end Developer, a Front end Developer, my manager and me. I was the lead of this team.
I asked the Back End Developer to teach me how the back and of the CMS is currently structured and how the current process of creating a new component looks like. I could make better design decisions knowing this, like when to combine elements and when to reuse them with consistency and speed of creating pages in mind. Based on the knowledge of the CMS, I wrote the technical requirements for each component for the back- and front end and came up with a content strategy.
After finishing the designs of the components, developers started building them. During this time, it felt like it was the right time to for me leave the company after 6 years, so I handed the project over to my manager.
I have learned a lot from this project. Especially the importance of proper research and speaking up when the approach of the project is not the right one in my opinion. What I could have done better is giving myself too much work and making the project too big. Knowing how systems work is a big advantage, but don't take over my colleagues job.
"It was a pleasure to work with Marjolein. She is intelligent, calm, organized and always involves others in finding UX minded solutions. She has a very solid and analytical design approach which always starts with research and getting customer insights. In the time that we collaborated Marjolein defined new pages, templates and components for knab.nl. Not only did she design them based on customer research and stakeholder requirements, she also took upon herself to write the technical requirements for our content management system Sitecore. She didn't shy away from understanding the system in detail to come up with a component based system aimed at reusability. I highly recommend Marjolein"
