Previously in this series, Eric Williamson, Acquia's Vice President of digital marketing, shared how to organize internal teams for a website redesign. Catch up and read Eric's blog, here.
Picking Huge as our partner for the redesign of Acquia.com was a big milestone. Courting an agency to lead front-end design was no small feat, and the team at Acquia was itching to get started.
Our project kickoff was fairly typical for a project of this size and scale. Huge brought its A-team from the D.C. office for a two-day working session at our Boston headquarters. The Huge team included representation from strategy, user experience, creative, and client services. From our side, we engineered the smallest team possible to keep both sides focused. This included key leads from each discipline that will be working on the redesign and our intrepid CMO, whom we trust with our lives.
Day 1
The project kickoff started with team introductions, and a tag-team presentation by myself and Lynne Capozzi (Acquia’s CMO). Lynne and I covered Acquia.com's history, the current state of our business and offered a deep dive into our brand.
Day 2
A majority of the second day was devoted to Huge’s stakeholder interviews. Stakeholder interviews offer Huge the chance to learn from each group in the company. Every department at Acquia, from sales to product, has different goals and challenges; it’s important that stakeholder perspective helps inform the direction of the redesign.
This period of discovery also extended to documenting the customer’s voice. Huge reached out to a handful of customers we selected based on the size and complexity of their digital ecosystems. We wanted people who have experienced big, hairy challenges out in the wild. People who have accrued scars and wisdom during their years of hunting big digital game. Lots of questions were asked, lots of information was sponged.
The working session shed light on some of the most important challenges our team will need to address in order to deliver a successful redesign. Here are our top three discoveries that emerged from stakeholder and customer interviews:
Challenge #1: How to Showcase our Products
Perhaps the most prominent challenge for this project is determining how to weave Acquia product demos into site experience. The goal of the new site is to create the best showcase of our products, services and customers. This requires us to envision how we show the pipes and wires of our products in a seamless and action-inspiring way.
It’s more complex than it sounds. We are asking Huge to theorize the best way to demonstrate how our products work when several components of our platform are brand new. This means learning new features and solutions, and determining which products are important to prioritize. Is each product deserving of a crazy-cool meta demo experience?
It’s extremely important that we deliver on this challenge. This need was recently underscored after receiving an unsolicited email from a prospect that stated “Acquia is a company on the leading edge of what marketing can do; however, they have not fully embraced and shown on their own web site."