Challenge: Click-through

We needed to create more opportunities for click-through so users could stay engaged on our site.

Solution

We styled a handful of “related content” features to automatically or manually surface content relationships across the site. A You might also like would autogenerate three related links, while fields like Projects & Tools connected visitors back to top level categories of content and reinforced the greater understanding of the organization.

Challenge: Events

On event days, our office repeatedly got calls from users asking if they could participate in events remotely, even though descriptive text explained how to do so. Event information was getting lost on event pages in blocks of text. The organization was losing out on potential participants.

Solution

We styled and tested special call out fields and some CTA copy for our events pages. As a result, more users RSVP’d to events, and more users understood that they could participate remotely.

Challenge: Community

To avoid the appearance of endorsing viewpoints, the Center wanted to make it clear that news items from fellows and affiliates were not outputs from the Center itself.

Solution

To avoid having to create a whole new content type in Drupal we took advantage of existing fields in the standard article content type. First, we used a checkbox for community content that surfaced a conversation icon on the frontend that was unique to this category of content. Second, we used a flexible eyebrow field for the news outlet, which further signaled to the user that this content was an outside contribution.

We also built a custom RSS ingestion module for Drupal which automated the curation process for pulling this content into the CMS. This automation module has ended up saving 2-3 hours of the Center communications team’s time every week.

As we got closer to the final deliverable in Summer of 2018, I became more engaged in detail level tasks of project implementation.

Using GitHub I scoped feature requests and wrote technical tickets for our dev team. I also performed a heavy amount of UX writing, generating breadcrumbs, headers, topic descriptions, and user documentation for other team members who would be managers in our Drupal CMS. Using Adobe Illustrator and Sketch, I mocked wireframes for key features, and generated UI elements such as icons that our dev team folded into the site’s final design.

As I took over the Communications Manager position in Fall of 2018 I led the rollout of our new website.

A result of the site relaunch in Fall of 2018 was a spike in engagement. Because we were more frequently updating our site with more engaging and newsworthy content, visitors and time-spent-on-site boomed. With more frequent content to direct people to, social channels exploded. Within a year, Twitter followers went up by almost 20,000, and weekly email newsletter subscribers doubled.

But we realized our most important impact by speaking directly with community members. As a result of our simple efforts to better highlight their work, our 2018-2019 class of fellows experienced more publicity for their work and more invitations to collaborate, which helped them in building their careers. Journalists and researchers reached out to us through our press channels with greater frequency. And our funders felt more familiar and engaged with the work our Center was doing.

Our new website and communications strategy reinvigorated our image as a world class research institution, and more importantly, helped enhance the impact of our work in the world.

Taking on such a big project — migrating an 18,000+ page site housing 20+ years of legacy content, with a limited budget and time, 10+ team distributed members, and 40+ very passionate stakeholders — was a rewarding career experience. You don’t come away from a project like this without some big lessons.

Your internal team is a key audience – don’t forget them!

In our research phase we spent a lot of time identifying external audiences we wanted to better serve. We didn’t spend as much time thinking of our internal team – the staff of the Center who would be actually managing and updating our new site!

We spent some early cycles iterating on features that would have indeed been exciting — like prominent hero images on every page. But after rolling some of these features into production we realized that our communications team would be too over extended to actually maintain content for these features.

We needed features that would save us time, not create new and complicated workflows. Had we done more shadowing, focus grouping, and journey mapping with our communications team earlier on we could have realized this insight and better incorporated it into our thinking.

Prototype, test, prototype, test, prototype…

The vendors we worked with had an uncommon approach of iterating design decisions in production mode. It was pretty cool to rapidly build and share new design directions as they would look in the browser.

But while this helped us a lot in our meetings with stakeholders, who enjoyed seeing iterations in the browser rather than looking at static mockups, it also shortchanged us on some of the critical sketching, wireframing, and user testing stages that would help us build a more robust logic for the site.

As a result, we ended up cementing a lot of design decisionmaking before we could comprehend the full flow that would result from those decisions.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would have spent a lot more time on the prototyping stage to build out our red routes and MVPs before burning a lot of time in production on features we were uncertain about.

Overcommunicate! And also Simplify

Our production team was distributed around the globe, which meant using lots of tools — Slack, Github, Zoom, Google Docs, Trello — to stay on track. When it felt like we weren’t understanding each other, however, a simple one-on-one phone call went a long way to iron out details like feature requests, timelines, or broader objectives. To help our more time-strapped stakeholders, we simplified critical updates into visuals, memos with bullet points, and bolded key decisions to be made. Project management methods like these saved us a lot of headaches and hurt feelings.