My Contributions

Challenges

Our primary challenge when redesigning the Acquia site was creating an experience around products that can’t be seen, for an audience used to innovative ideas and bold outcomes. Many customers know Acquia as a Drupal-hosting company. However; Acquia's strategy was evolving to focus on tools for data capture and intelligence. In the past, Acquia’s online audience was heavily IT-centric, interested in features and technical details. Customer messaging was originally hyper-focused on specs, and overly vague about their product's results. Developers within the Acquia community were already familiar with Acquia's capabilities, but weren't always the key decision makers for enterprise companies interested in Acquia's products and services. If Acquia really wanted to stand out against it's competitors, they needed to be speaking to enterprise marketing leaders. During our stakeholder interviews we heard thins like:

Our second challenge was guiding their existing tech-centric audience to the blogs, and elevating marketing content to target CMOs. Acquia's new target audience is less concerned with technical complexity, and more focused on image and brand. A new level of sophistication in messaging and design was needed in order to appeal to a more marketing-centric audience. Our proposed content strategy helped paint a clear picture of their products benifits for a non-tech savvy audiences. 

Finally, we wanted to differentiate Acquia as the partner that gets the industry. Acquia should talk more about its impressive client roster. Many stakeholders mentioned projects or clients that prove Acquia is ready to challenge its biggest competitors in the enterprise space, but many of those names were not found on the site.

Demo Tool

While doing some competitive analysis, we discovered most of their competitors had a “Request a Demo” call-to-action (CTA) in the navigation. Clicking those CTAs would typically take users to forms that required contact information. A customer service rep would then follow-up with more questions to better understand the businesses goals, then try to sell a user on a products.

When reimagining the demo request, we wanted it to be a tailored experiences unique to each potential customers needs. Rather than asking for contact info upfront, our tool would give prospects a glimpse of the success they could achieve with the Acquia platform.  Contact info and other data metrics collected from each user’s session within the tool would be sent to a sales representative. The sales rep. could then use that data to have a more focused conversations specific to that users wants. I created the the following prototype to help our client better understand the tools functionality.

Using The Tool

Step 1
A user first enters their company’s website url.

Step 2
By utilizing SimilarWeb’s API, our tool would the extract data from 4 main sources to identify problems Acquia could address. The tool pulls assorted engagement data, average visit duration, pages per visit, bounce rates, and SEO metrics. 

Step 3
The tool would then present those site metrics side-by-side to the users potential success if it was powered by Acquia. The tool would also surface case studies relevant to the user's industry and needs. Users could then see for them selves exactly how Acquia helped customers within their own market, then share those insights with there leadership teams.  

Template Systems

Our template system was designed to be flexible and learns from its user's activity. By utilizing Acquia Lift’s personalization API, we could tracks each users session, then promote content based on their actions throughout the rest of the user's journey. For example, if a user navigates to a specific product page, they would then potentially see insights specific to that product throughout the rest there session. The quality of that experience can make the difference between conversion and users who bail. My contribution consisted of structuring the template system, wiring components, created interaction patterns, and producing numerous prototypes for our developers to build.

Concepts & Interaction

During the design phase I created a number of interactions to heighten the site's overall experience. Here are a few concepts I explored while redesigning the sites interaction models.