NEWaukee
Overview
NEWaukee is a brand engagement agency that works with organizations looking for innovative ways to engage their customers. As an evolving business that initially started as a community movement producing programming 15 years ago, their website didn’t reflect their new business model and offerings effectively. Having their online presence reflect new services and the great work they do was important to the business as they kick off their 15th year in business.
How might we represent new business offerings to increase new business prospects while remaining true to the NEWaukee brand? My solution was clear and to-the-point copy and simple interfaces that differentiate NEWaukee from the competition.
My contribution
UX design UX researcher UX writing Copywriting
The team
1 × VP of marketing 1 × lead designer 1 x VP of operations 1 x CEO
Year
2024
Discovery
Performing a content and website audit
While the previous iteration of the website was visually appealing, it was outdated and its navigation was designed for the company’s previous business model and goals. Taking a look first at noticeable design discrepancies and usability issues was helpful to understand where the site stood currently.
Takeaways:
- Layout designed for previous business model: realign page layouts and formatting to fit new business model and tell a better brand story to business prospects (i.e. case study pages, blog pages)
- Clunky menu and navigation: rework the menu to be a typical navbar at the top of the page, visible for all and not hidden under a button. Also, collapse some content and pages into others to reduce cognitive load and simplify the information architecture
- Illogical page hierarchy: reorder the hierarchy of certain pages to better align with business and user priorities when scrolling a page.
Sizing up the competition
There are many marketing and advertising agencies today and differentiating yourself has never been more important. There are agencies of all sizes and capabilities, so doing a competitive analysis helped understand what pages were table stakes, trending features and any other ways to create a unique website experience. I made sure to include direct and indirect competitors to glean the most well-rounded insights.
Highlights:
- Most agencies included the typical pages you’d expect to see (home, about, work, services, blog) – though some folded services and work together
- A majority of the websites utilized the entire page with minimal margins
- Visuals like photo and video were on the forefront with copy and content as a supplement
Define
Understanding who is the NEWaukee audience
Before making any design and content decisions, I had a working session with the team to better understand who were business prospects they were targeting in their business development and dig deeper into the NEWaukee brand story. The team was able to share previous feedback they had received from current and past clients, which served well in creating user personas that guided the design exploration process. Their two main business targets were HR executives and marketing directors. Meet Lindsay and Cassie!
Simplifying information architecture
Based on the competitive analysis, client working session and other research, I was able to create a simplified sitemap. The main pages remained relatively the same with some content tweaks and moved sections within other pages (i.e. testimonial page content was incorporated into the services page).
Ideate
Exploring new page concepts
I created mid-fidelity wireframes that would help get closer to the look and feel of the site. I skipped high fidelity and built the website within the website builder. I also drafted and developed all brand copy and microcopy.
Homepage
Catering to NEWaukee’s business prospects, I made sure the homepage would be a one stop shop and provide you with a taste of their brand story. The team received feedback that prospective and current clients felt the website, especially the homepage, didn't sell their services well as the team had made minor edits to make it work as a temporary solution with what had been built in 2013.
Highlights:
- Reordered hierarchy in order of priority
- Incorporated more visual elements throughout, letting visuals come to the forefront with copy complementing (i.e. continuous hero video and photo gallery)
- Copy was developed with brand voice in mind (friendly, to the point, not stuffy or corporate)
About Page
An about page is typical for a business website, especially an agency doing work for clients. I worked to elaborate more on “who” NEWaukee is, infusing new business goals, proposition and services. In addition, the evolution of the company was important in storytelling, so a section on culture, values and history were added to the page with updated new copy.
Services Page
Promoting new services was one of the project goals, so this was an important page redesign. I enhanced and revised the copy to be more straightforward that reflected the services buckets (Discover, Design, Deploy).
Services Subpages
Initially the subpages were a secondary priority, but there was time left before launch to complete. The addition of services subpages was mostly for SEO purposes with the added benefit of using them as sales sheets when prospective clients request them for certain services.
Focus on case study layout template
Another big focus was on case studies, since showcasing the agency’s work was important in selling their services. Taking into consideration the research and competitive analysis, I made a layout template that could be tweaked depending on the complexity of the project. Like the rest of the website, I wanted images and videos to be the center of attention with words complimenting.
General structure:
- How we made NEW possible // How it connected
- Project background
- Media gallery
- Quote testimonial
- Challenge and solution
- Results
- Approach
Adding in SEO details
With content and design in place, I added all SEO items for each page and media within the pages to best optimize the website’s search rankings. The creation of the service subpages also was intentional from an SEO perspective, utilizing various keywords for services provided.
Testing
Testing with current clients and iterating before launch
NEWaukee’s current client base was a great resource to gather feedback and conduct unmoderated usability testing. Our goal was to assess overall usability and functionality of media, links and buttons. Once feedback was gathered, I made the necessary iterations before the official switch over and launch from the old website.
Testing Insights & Highlights:
- Added CTAs higher up on services pages – there was lots of rich content on the services pages with no CTA buttons. Contact us CTA buttons were added higher up on the pages to be more visible
- Incorporated more video throughout – to break up static images, I made sure to add even more videos, especially on the homepage within the media gallery.
Outcome
So, what’s next?
Of course, websites are living, breathing products that can be iterated and updated upon. I conducted a proper handoff to the greater team to make sure any copy and content changes wouldn’t break anything on the website. This was most important for case studies as a template layout was created to maintain consistency across all of them.
What did I learn?
- Content migration – this was one of the first projects where I worked with pre-existing content within a CMS. There were many blogs to transfer to the new website CMS. With Squarespace’s blog collection page, it made it easy to set up and organize. We also took this time to prioritize the "best of the best" blogs to bring over from the old website.
- Designing for B2B audiences – as an engagement agency, NEWaukee’s customers are businesses themselves. It was important to establish who they were trying to target as potential clients before beginning the project to best align with the new business model and service offerings.