Background

I worked with LA-based agency Beyond Curious as the UX design lead an 8-week redesign project for their client Vertiv. Our task was to improve the site's usability and enhance its overall user experience.

Vertiv designs and builds mission-critical infrastructure technologies and provides services and solutions for critical power systems, data centers, and thermal management systems.

A year prior to this project, Beyond Curious had been hired to work with Emerson Electric on a rebranding and identity design project, including a website redesign to reflect the new brand name and identity of Vertiv.

Discovery: Ramp-up and Workshop

To learn more about the problem we were solving for and the business requirements (as well as foster transparency and alignment with the stakeholders), we facilitated a discovery workshop at Vertiv's headquarters.

I wanted context to be able to get to understand the client, the product, and it's users.

Ramp-up Tasks and Materials

• Conduct Heuristic Evaluation and Site Review
• Assess site’s adherence to usability and cognitive principles
• High-level review of site’s architecture and content types
• Research Findings and Project Goals
• Review existing research findings from Vertiv
• User interview observations and findings
• User survey findings
• Phase 3 proposal

Discovery Workshop

A lot of insights, perspectives, and ideas were gathered during the two day interactive workshop.

Now it was time to prioritize and distill all of the collected data and begin the ideation phase.

Ideation

We kicked off the ideation phase by analyzing and distilling the findings we had gathered. The patterns that emerged:

Client Concerns

• Users are not scrolling on specific pages, such as the Home Page and Support Page
• User consumption of site content could be improved
• Issues with SEO as it relates to Organic Traffic

Major Issues Identified

“It’s not user-friendly for grabbing a part number.”

“I've been doing this for 30 years, so I know specifically what I want.”

• Users are experiencing difficulty finding product information; most information only existed in PDFs not optimized for search
• Search results can be improved to return more relevant results
• Better product categorization would allow users to find information faster
• Users' (especially highly experienced power users) mental models did not align with how the site was structured

Design, Test, Repeat

We prioritized the problems in terms of urgency + resources needed to solve.

Addressing the findability of product details was the most urgent need, and with that, redesigning how products were categorized, how product data was listed in the site, and the structure of the product detail pages.

This included changes to the main navigation, the search results page content and filtering functionality, creating a custom search tool, and listing the most frequently searched product data types and listing them on the product pages rather than only in a PDF.

We also addressed the client concerns of specific page types not being viewed, and assessed the current content and recommended what content types were more relevant for users on those pages.

View the high-fidelity prototype.