** These are some of the exciting projects that I got to work on in the past year or so while working at Vertic. In the time of putting together my portfolio, these sites were in mid-development, so I had to cover-up the branding with mock logos and content, but the information on the companies are completely factual.
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Innophos
A publicly traded international producer of specialty ingredient solutions that benefit the food, health, nutrition and industrial markets. The Company blends and formulates phosphate, mineral and botanical-based ingredients to help its customers offer products that are tasty, healthy, nutritious and economical. Reported revenue for 2018 was $802 million. We were able to help them with their brand positioning, transform their digital platform and develop a fully scalable and responsive system.
What I did:
UI / Visual Design
Team:
Design - Conrado Colnaghi / Kenji Tomita / Jessy Montoya
UX Team - Anna Deu
Strategy - Kim Plesner / Sandra Mai Pho Tu / Johannes Hultquist / Joycelyn Chen
Year:
2018 - 2019
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PROJECT OBJECTIVES:
Awareness - Create greater brand visibility across markets.
Usage - Build customer relationships that improve the customer experience and fosters greater brand loyalty.
System Growth - A website that grows with the company. Enable customer service through improved document search capability and eventually add e-commerce functionality overtime.
Problems:
Brand Communication - While trying to focus more on the food and beverage markets, this company is currently struggling with how their site will help position themselves in a competitive market.
Poor Site Structure - Their current customers find it difficult to find information on their products and place sample requests. This also effects driving leads and engagement.
Outdated Design - The current vision for scientific advancements in nutrition and health doesn’t currently communicate on their current site. Having a pre-dated template like design creates a disconnect in trust and credibility.
Solution:
Putting focus on design and IA will help both with the brand positioning and experience. Using our systematic approach to design will deliver a custom and scalable platform to accommodate their business goals.
How'd We Get There:
Current Website Structure - Taking a closer look at the website structure helped define KPIs and website objectives.
Defining Key Stakeholders - By interviewing and surveying stakeholders, strategy was able to define the goals and needs for the groups:
• Potential Customers - Finding all the relevant information and documentation to consider the company as a supplier. They need market insights and brand/product information to run pre-qualification checks.
• Investors - Locating data and information to make informed decisions. Accessibility to periodical newsletters, quarterly investor materials and annual reports.
• Career Seekers - Finding a career that is challenging and meaningful. Easily find a clear overview of the company's offerings and the industry they operate in.
Use Cases - Based on the defined objectives and KPIs of the website the team was able to come up with multiple use cases.
Design System:
Part of the benefits of working within a systematic approach is being able to customize to the user's needs. As the company position's themselves and adds more content the building blocks will be able to mold into what the content creators want to achieve. We created states where elements were optional, leaving the client complete autonomy. We had also made sure that our modular approach will accommodate tablet and mobile.
Takeaways:
This project served its fair amount of challenges; heavy content design and design/development handoffs. The project started off with designers that no longer work at Vertic, so continuing to design for this project had left us with some questions, but still felt familiar. When everyone speaks the same language it creates a better process. The same went for the development phase of this project; the developers who started working on it are no longer working on it now. The real question is how to create an informed handover when key designers and developers are moved around? I hope to better build on the current process while I continue to work on these types of projects.