Overview
Microsoft’s annual TechReady conference had a website in need of a serious reboot. Years of excel tables and word docs had been piled on top of one another, without serious thought to the site architecture or user experience. The result was hundreds of pages of unorganized information with no particular structure. I was brought in to completely redesign the site from the ground up. The new and improved website would also serve as a template for the TechReady app redesign.
Role: Wireframes, User Flows, Documentation
Sr. Digital Producer: Drew Albenze
Creative Director: Suzanne Asprea
Agency: Publicis Experiences
The Opportunity
Tons of content, next to no structure. The existing site wasn’t responsive, and didn’t conform to any styleguide or branding. In short, it was a mess. On the plus side, I was given carte blanche to design a solution. Make it work The new site needed to be responsive, intuitive, and scalable. I started by compiling all the different existing content types and grouping them into modules. These would serve as the interchangeable building blocks of the site. With Creative Director Suzanne Asprea working on the information architecture, we were able to determine a hierarchy of needs and user pain points.
Iterating is for winners
Mobile first is the phrase that pays, so I focused my energies towards building a finger-friendly framework and scaled up from there. Hundreds of wireframes, iterations and feedback from stakeholders led to a responsive design that could be easily implemented and maintained by the dev team.
Refine, rinse, repeat
The end result was an organized, intuitive, responsive site. Attendees could now view the event calendar and build their schedules on any device. Information was designed to be scannable, searchable and easily surfaced rather than buried behind a maze of links.
I created a scalable modular content framework that made adding, updating or removing content easy to build and move around.
My role concluded with presenting the wireframes with documentation to the stakeholders.
