Stakeholder Interviews
Competitive Analysis
User Personas
User Journeys/Impact Pages
Information Architecture
Content Workshop
Site Mapping
Wireframing
Prototyping
Environments at Work (EAW) is the Boston region dealer for Haworth, one of the largest manufacturers of office furniture in the US. With a nearly five year old site that was notoriously difficult to update, EAW called on ICS to rethink their site and that of their sister brand, Integrated Interiors.
During Discovery, I met with company stakeholders, interiors designer, architects, project managers, and Haworth reps about their relationship to EAW. During these hours of interviews, one thing was very clear — clients genuinely love working with the people at EAW.
A wild idea
Taking this information along with an understanding of their unique business model led me to a somewhat unorthodox idea for a company that sells furniture: stop telling users about furniture. For all of the personas I designed, not one of them was looking to EAW to provide insights on specific products. They wanted EAW’s planning, design, and project management expertise as well as the opportunity to work with an amazing, dedicated team.
Potential clients, architects, interior designers, and project managers need a project to go off without a hitch. Focusing content on the service EAW provides was key in getting their buy-in. For this reason, all mentions to product would be in the context of a completed project where they would also have the opportunity to talk about the team involved, the challenges encountered, and the problems solved.
Introduction of Impact Pages
When it came time to start thinking about user journeys, I ran into a problem that often plague sites like this that aren’t goal-oriented: how do you design hypothetical paths for a user that is on a fact-finding mission and not out to complete some predetermined goal? Rather than the typical route of imagining likely journeys based on a few entry points and a healthy dose of assumption, I decided to focus on the content that each person might find useful to their own soft goals and use that shape the design and content of those pages. By taking a more focused, targeted view, I was able to better communicate to the client why certain pages would be important and begin working with them to get the content we’d need to fulfill the needs of our users.
This project was completed at Image Conscious Studios.