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Design case – Yacht Responsive Website
As an agile/scrum team, we had the opportunity to redesign and improve the Yacht website. After conducting market research, it became clear that Yacht presented a significant opportunity as a brand within a market segment not covered by its leading brand, Randstad.
Given that both the brand and marketing teams were simultaneously working on the brand and identity of Yacht, we took the opportunity to collaborate closely and share our research and findings.
Get all the information you can find
Our first step was gathering all available information. We created a stakeholder map to identify the individuals for our one-on-one interviews. Due to limited analytics data on product usage, one of our initial priorities was to implement data tracking and analytics through development. Additionally, we conducted competitor research and obtained valuable insights from the marketing team regarding our target audience.
Using this information, we defined the Product Vision, the Value Proposition & and the Business Goals. We also translated these insights into problem statements that kick-started our ideation process. From there, we identified potential opportunities and prioritised feasible next steps.
Using insights
We created a high-level roadmap that guided our work for nearly four years throughout the validation and discussion stages with stakeholders and the lead development team. This roadmap included dependencies with other teams, such as the brand and marketing teams, as well as technical dependencies.
Deliverables included a validated Product strategy, a high-level roadmap and a set of personas.
Our strategy
Based on our insights, we recognised that this particular group of professionals typically did not actively search for jobs but rather waited for recruiters to approach them. Our plan involved starting from the bottom-up hierarchy to address this, establishing a solid foundation of compelling content for young professionals. This content included articles and events aimed at helping professionals improve their skills, thereby fostering trust with the target audience.
Considering that these pages were content-focused and we aimed to present ourselves as no-strings-attached, we placed less emphasis on branding. This allowed the brand team time to work on their magic. However, we did update the UI, components, and user flows and made minimal colour changes to maintain a cohesive site with the old pages.
Challenges
Challenges for the article pages included close collaboration with the marketing team to ensure the creation of appealing content that would enhance SEO rankings. Simultaneously, our team focused on designing and implementing the best user experience for professionals and providing content creators with an easy-to-use CMS. This involved tasks such as adding tag and category options, providing guidance on styling and structuring pages, ensuring images were suitable for all viewports, and incorporating analytics tags to gather relevant data.
In tackling challenges related to event pages, we worked closely with stakeholders from various professional subdomains. Yacht had nine subdomains, each with its own team engaging with professionals in their respective fields. We concentrated on the three largest domains, understanding their needs and pain points through interviews with both the teams and professionals. Additionally, we analysed the market, identifying commonalities and best practices. With this knowledge, we explored the flow and designs of the event pages, engaging in discussions and validations with stakeholders, users, and the development team.
Sorting user problems | Design sprint | Sketches of the event page
While developing the article and event pages, we also focused on refining the information architecture of the new Yacht site. Navigation was a crucial aspect, and to ensure correctness, we conducted a card-sorting user test to validate categories, naming, and hierarchy.
Next big steps
After completing these initial steps, we continued working on major milestones, including ‘job search & apply’ and the ‘my environment’ sections. We conducted design sprints and extensive user testing while continuously evaluating and improving our implemented designs using analytics data, surveys, heat-maps, session recordings, and A/B testing and created customer journeys to plot our insight so we know the user’s pain and gain.
The Yacht website is an ongoing project, constantly evolving and improving. You can visit the live website to explore the latest updates.
