Case Study | Home Page Redesign

Published in

Natalia Franciele

7 min readMay 21, 2018

Image source: https://www.klabin.com.br/pt/sustentabilidade#relatorio

GOAL

Propose a redesign for an institutional home page of a Pulp and Paper Industry, maintaining consistency with internal pages that would not be modified. It was necessary to modernize some elements and present coherence regarding the content offered by the website during the navigation and that has low engagement.

CHALLENGE

The website was developed with a framework that brought some performance issues, such as a boring delay in loading pages. Our work as a team of UX, UI and Tech was to design a new solution that, in addition to making the home page more attractive, could avoid this performance problem, while being able to connect and access other pages in the old structure.

PROCESS

First, I conducted an audit process on the existing website to map correlations between pages and navigation, especially those that follow the main menu.

So, I drew a sitemap to make sure that all pages could be reorganized and reallocated into a new version of the home. Even in this process, several gaps have been identified and recorded for future improvement of the website as a whole.

Combined with this and even if the project had no investment in research with real users, I tried to use resources such as benchmarking and “exploratory interviews” to discover as much information as possible about the company, its market positioning and strategic differential.

I highlighted the word “exploratory interview” because I had to resort to my own method, adapted to the situation, to speak informally with the company’s employees in the opportunities that I had visiting one of the main operations in Telêmaco Borba, Paraná — although informal, I was careful to select key questions to identify sensitive business points and that could be useful for this new way of presenting the company.

After that, and helped by the Communication and Marketing team — which has a lot of insights about the sections that could be presented in the first page, but who barely talked with its own audience, we understood that in the old version is not possible to answer three basic questions about the business:

What does the company do?
Where in the world are its operations?
Why is the company relevant for the society?

PROPOSED SOLUTION

With focus on these three questions, the UI Designer and I worked together to design a new homepage that could easily answer that and, in consequence, catch the user's attention. Our main purpose with this strategy was to improve the visit rate of the internal pages — which were not even noticed before.

After a couple days of work, this is what we've had:

Submenu

In the actual framework it’s not possible change the disposal of the elements in the submenu, giving an impression of mess and hiding important access to pages. Because of this, we redesigned it as well with the purpose of guiding the user through the different business fronts.

Business and Products

In this new version we made it a point to present clearly the manufactured products, even because the company was launching the production operations of an important feedstock: fluff pulp — in whole country we have just two producers.

With this section, we clearly answer to the first question: “What does the company do?” and, in addition, through call-to-action we stimulate user curiosity by providing access to detailed information on each of the business fronts.

The supporting texts used for layout marking are not the final version of the verbal language suggested for this context.

Units and Offices

The Pulp and Paper Industry of this study has its headquarters located in São Paulo city, eighteen industrial units (seventeen in Brazil and one in Argentina), sales offices in eight Brazilian states and a branch office in the United States, as well as sales representatives and agents in many countries.

The problem was that in order to discover this a user has to access two steps, one of them hidden in a submenu option.

So, answering the second question "Where in the world are its operations?" and to show the greatness and importance of this company to the economy of the country, we illustrate its presence using a map. In fact, we chose to give evidence to production units instead of showing all commercial offices because they are the heart of the company — however, we provide a quick access link to the complete contact list.

Sustainability and People Management

Environmental and Social responsabilities are some of the main concerns of this industry and a lot of actions are taken by the company to help its employees, surrounding communities and the nature preservation.

[…]"We promote, in an integrated manner, the engagement and development of our people and the communities where we operate in order to achieve increasingly better and sustainable results for the entire value chain."
— Vision of Sustainability

With the objective of considering and elucidating this important contribution to society, the environment and its own collaborators, we created a section where multimedia content could be available — and consumed without the need to leave the website. Answering the third question "Why is the company relevant for the society?" as well.

BONUS 💡 Contact Channel

With a gigantic presence and diverse products, services and actions available to the public — both the target audience and society in general, the company can be contacted in different ways and channels, which on the actual website is confusing to find or is not so evident.

In this new proposal, we mapped some contact patterns that reach the general service of the company and segmented it, providing customized forms for each of them. In this way, it would even be possible to improve the internal management of received messages and their respective answers.

LESSONS

Content is the king, and guide the user is the kingdom. One does not exist without the other. You could have all the content of the world in your website, but if you do not guide the steps of the user to get interested and discover, you must accept two things: the fact that it is very difficult for him to do this by himself and that your "so carefully shelved content" will never be seen.

At this point you must be asking yourself: "Ok, but I visited the company website and none of this was implemented, what happened?"

Well, it happens. Many times, by the way. In this case it was several reasons, actually. I was working for a Digital Agency that provides service to other companies so we have to consider that things like budget, technical limitations by customer part, misalignment between the commercial and product areas — better known as battle of egos, and so many other factors could happen.

And what we can learn from all of this is that all the work is worth it 💪. Not only for its end result but for its experimentation and learning journey. As a UX Designer I highly value the idiosyncratic journeys that each one of the projects that I participate offer me.

Whether as a member of the team or when I need to lead, I believe that communication, exchange and collaboration are fundamental for good results. However, even if the main result could not be achieved, as a team we will be sure that we have done a good job.