MHE Product Micro Sites
Marketing Sites Highlight Individual Products
Overview
As a stop-gap measure during development of a new marketing CMS platform, our team of UX Designers was tasked with establishing and implementing a process for the development of multiple product microsites prioritized by Marketing leadership within a specified time period. The deadlines were staggered and time was short.
Steps to Success
For this project, Sales and Marketing personel were seen as our end-users, as they would be using these sites as tools for presentation of these upcoming products. So, with a staggered schedule for 18 product microsites to develop, we began by gathering initial background details about each product from respective marketing and sales teams with a brief survey to ascertain target audience, core messaging and key marketing differentiators.
Planning for each site began with a design launch meeting with the product marketing and sales team, visual designers, copywriters, and UX designers. During these white-boarding sessions we (UX) would lead discussions with marketing and sales and begin sketching out sitemaps and thumbnails for each page to establish priority, hierarhy, user flow and the overall structure of presentation. Meanwhile the visual designers and copywriters present would begin crafting plans to begin develop asethetic presentation and content.
The UX deliverable from the design launch meeting was a sitmap and basic sketches for each page of a given site. The next step for us was to build wireframes for each site which would go through a series of revisions and reviews with marketing and sales until structure and flow was agreed upon. All sites were to be responsive, so our wireframes had to reflect content planning for display on all media sizes.
As UX "digital designers" our team had a background in visual and UI design and were serving to coordinate the visual design development process by providing feedback to designers and guiding the approval process.
We establised a system for tracking content creation with copywriters and image researchers by using our wireframes as a content map. By adding content tags to all sections of our wireframes, and creating corresponding tracking spreadsheets, we were able to ensure all content was being generated in line with establised development schedules.
Once visual designs were approved and properly aligned with established wireframes, we were tasked with supplying detailed build specifications, and structured content directories to the offshore development team.
Working with internal development coordinators, we met with our off-shore vendor to review requirements and specifications, address questions and concerns, and initiate site development. During development, we held weekly stand-up meeting to track and review progress.
We established target platform criteria, test scripts, and an online bug tracking system for testing sites as they were delivered, and logging and tracking of reported bugs.
As sites went live, we used our bug tracking system to generate a backlog of future site enhancements and worked out a customized sprint system for developing and implementing solutions for new feature requests.
