MG
Michael Gallegly - Portfolio
Project Overview
Staples had for several years operated two separate content hubs living on different CMS platforms and serving different audience needs. The first site - Small Business Hub - provided content for a singular persona: small business owners responsible for numerous tasks to promote their businesses and keep them running. The site helped guide visitors towards products they needed, which they could purchase through Staples.com. The second site - Staples Business Advantage Resource Center - targeted multiple personas: employees within larger organizations working in roles such as marketing, office administration, procurement, furniture buying, and other disciplines. The site provided them with helpful content and aimed to guide them towards the Staples Business Advantage program, which offered membership-based purchasing plans, consulting, bulk ordering, and other benefits.
In 2017 Staples realized a need to join these sites together to make them easier to manage, and to more easily cross-promote relevant content to all visitors on the site. Between the two sites, content was often created twice and rewritten to suit the needs of each site's audience. Staples enlisted Manifest to conceive and design a new content hub that would consolidate content from both old sites, and serve up a personalized experience to return visitors.
Responsibilities & Tasks
- Conceptual UX and UI design
- Responsive wireframes in Sketch
- User testing oversight and observation
- Content personalization planning for Aquia Lift
- CMS customization planning for Hippo CMS
- Iterative design during six month agile schedule
- Collaboration with internal team of six, and client team of four
Previous Sites
New Site - Personalization Blueprint
To plan our personalization efforts early in the project, I created the following documents to better understand the factors that influence the personalization profile we could build on users. Staples had long been tracking user data in various ways, through pixeling, Marketo tracking, cookies, and other methods. We explored how we could use this visitor intelligence to shape the content on the site, and to better understand the UX goals for the redesign.
This documentation also helped us plan how we would build our personalization engine to ensure that the small business owner persona would continue to receive product suggestions, while the Staples Business Advantage personas would not see products, and would instead see CTA's that drive them to the Business Advantage program only if they weren't already a member.
Sitemap & Content Consolidation
We spent significant time exploring a new navigation structure that would allow us to properly consolidate content from both old sites. Our first approach, shown below, found us organizing around distinct personas to help visitors quickly navigate based on their role.
Wireframes
I created site-wide wireframes in Sketch for desktop and mobile throughout our agile sprints. These wireframes utilized a new UI kit and pattern library I built to share across our internal teams, to help us work more efficiently and establish greater consistency in our work.
Final Designs
