Overhauling a Corporate Website
Managing a team to bring a company's brand to the modern age
COMPANY
Bay3000 Consulting Inc.
ROLE
Product Manager, Visual Designer, Content Writer
DURATION
7 Months
THE OPPORTUNITY
Bay3000 Consulting is a Toronto-based company founded in the 90s, with a website to match. I was tasked to lead the overhaul of their website.
THE OUTCOME
Managed a team of 4 to completely overhaul Bay3000's website, including the payment experience.
SKILLS
Product Management
Visual Design
Bay3000 Consulting Inc. is a project management training and consulting provider based in Toronto, Canada. As the Manager of Marketing & Operations at EZSigma Group (sister company to Bay3000 Consulting), I was tasked to overhaul Bay3000's dated website. This project was one of my first exposures to design - web design that served business needs. It was also a long term product that I managed with a team under me.
The project design decisions were mainly stakeholder driven. I used some elements of user centered design, but looking back, would have loved to conduct more interviews and usability testing. I learned a lot from this project, specifically on what not to do in the future.
Bay3000 has 4 main revenue streams:
Public Courses
Online Courses
Corporate On-site Training
Corporate Consulting
Their customer base is comprised of 4 major groups:
Customer Personas
Individuals
Aspiring Project Manager
Dave is a business analyst for a consumer packaged goods company. He wants to take on more responsibility and develop his project management skills to transition to a project manager role. He visits Bay3000.com to register for courses like their public Project Management Fundamentals class.
Practicing Project Manager
Deepika has been a project manager for several years at an automotive company and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), for which she had to take an intensive exam.
As a PMP, Deepika needs to take skill development classes regularly to satisfy her credential requirements. She visits Bay3000.com to register for e-learning courses like the Agile Methodology Bootcamp.
Corporations
On-site Employee Training
Alex is an HR Manager for a large manufacturing company and is responsible for 30 employees that need to be trained in Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. He visits Bay3000.com to contract them to lead an on-site 5 day Lean Six Sigma Green Belt class.
Corporate Consulting
Susannah is a Director of Operations at a hospital. The COO is spearheading a process improvement initiative and the company needs an expert to kickstart the project and mentor select employees to drive the culture of improvement in the years to come. She visits Bay3000.com to contract a process improvement expert for an 8 month consulting engagement.
THE WEBSITE
Before
The extremely busy front page doesn’t afford intuitive user actions.
Form field labels can cause confusion due to lack of spacing as well as distance of the label from the field.
After
The most common categories are shown below the fold. The solutions tab is aimed at individuals, while the services tab is meant for companies.
This pop up comes up when an individual clicks on a course for more details. There are several ways this page encourages a visitor to buy. One, the ‘Register’ button is found in two places, above and below the page. This is similar to Amazon. There are three testimonials also shown which provide social proof. There is an in depth description of the course including Bay3000’s credentials and value proposition.
Link to website: bay3000.com
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
I lead a team of 4 and reported to 3 Managing Partners, all with their own priorities and requirements.
I was also in charge of:
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Information Architecture
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Course registration design
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QA and testing
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Content editing
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Image selection
Lessons Learned
The design of this website was stakeholder-driven. We did not conduct usability studies before rolling it out.
If I could lead this project again, knowing what I now know, I would:
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Interview the 4 main customer types for insights on what they think of Bay3000, and what their needs are
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Design multiple versions of wireframes for the website and share with the team
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Create a sitemap and use card sorting among the team to prioritize page content
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Contract a UX Writer to write, or at least oversee, content for the website
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Establish metrics with which to measure success (conversion, engagement)
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After designing multiple versions of the website in mid fidelity, conduct A/B Testing to determine which types of customers prefer certain designs
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Extensively user test the checkout process (for example with ‘Think Alouds’)