Website Redesign
Modernizing for digital consumers
For large corporations with well established brands and extensive digital ecosystems, redesigns can be daunting. But after focusing on “quick wins” with amfam.com for 2 years, it was time to dive deeper and focus on fixing much larger issues I was seeing with the site like: performance issues, users struggling to navigate, leaky digital sales funnels and consistent comments about the content feeling overwhelming and confusing.
Project Highlights:
- Led design strategy and execution across internal teams and external agency teams.
- Won highest honors for best shopping satisfaction from J.D. Power 2023
- Developed project brief, established timelines and led regular working meetings and project review meetings with stakeholders and leadership teams
- Worked side-by-side with UX researcher specialist to establish and execute on iterative design and testing plan
- Established new partnerships with digital content writers to define and improve internal content processes
- Led development team in evaluating and exploring our digital ecosystem and setup to plan for future integrations and streamline systems
Project Roles
Design strategy // Design leadership // Information architecture // User research // UX & UI design // Product management
The Problems
For this full redesign, the project strategy needed to address both customer problems and internal business issues. Here were the biggest pain points we set out to solve for:
Customer problems:
- Website is not optimized for mobile devices
- Too much content that is confusing and uses insurance jargon
- Visual and functional inconsistencies across the website erode trust
Business problems:
- Significant customer gap with millennial customers
- Compounding tech debt slows the site’s performance and team velocity
- Needed improvements to meet WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards
- Inefficient content authoring practices
- Outdated digital content strategy
Pre-work & Planning
To get started, we were able to leverage our navigation optimization project and build onto it. I worked with one lead designer and one content specialist from our external agency team to define and map out the key pages necessary to support our digital marketing funnels.
We identified and documented each page types’ purpose, content needs, and noted considerations for personalization. From there, we layered on the main traffic source for each page type.
This deliverable set a foundation for:
- defining the project scope
- prioritizing the templates for design
- planning timelines
- identify & recruit the right teams and stakeholders
- establishing project goals and KPIs
I facilitated the project kick off meeting where we brought together all the teams with product leadership to align on the scope and deliverables. Planning and managing this project was quite an undertaking! Not only did we have several internal teams involved, but we had members of our external design agency partnering with us for design and content.
Design
I led the design team in a dual-track approach. I started designing our homepage template, while our agency team started on a main product page template at the same time. We followed this strategy to:
- get a handful of distinctly different concepts for testing
- cast a wide net among our target audience to understand what resonates
- get feedback and insights to establish guardrails for what elements, content, and visuals our designs should feature
From there, I would bring the 2 design teams together for collaboration. We’d work closely to find cohesive ways to represent the company brand.
Iterative Testing
Through many cycles of unmoderated testing and iterating we narrowed in on designs that hit all of our design success criteria:
- All information finding tasks were completed with 80% accuracy
- Rating scales for perceived usability, visual appeal, and perceived trustworthiness averaged .2 points higher than the baseline
- 25% of word picks were positive and included: creative, modern, fresh, inspiring, or innovative
Results
The team now has a batch of cohesive designs for several page templates. I am working with a UX Researcher to use these pages for more comprehensive workflow testing. We will use this testing to confirm our direction is resonating with users and that the designs will successfully scale for our business needs and goals.
New designs and strategy call for new documentation and updated guidelines. I am creating guidelines and resources to help with onboarding additional designers to this project and share with other digital product teams to maintain consistency with deliverables.
What's Next
A design foundation and direction is established. Now, I am focusing on implementation strategies with the development team. The engineering team has followed along with the design and testing cycles. We have a better picture of what we will need to deliver to meet customer needs. I am planning a design workshop to examine our Sitecore setup and our technology ecosystem. Our goal is to optimize, streamline, and future-proof our solution for implementing this new redesign.
This redesign helped American Family insurance go from the bottom of J.D. Power’s list of best digital insurance shopping experiences in 2021 to the top in 2023!
