Case Study — Creating a Human-Centered Digital Strategy and UX Design to Drive Results

“How can we turn the million+ page enterprise company website into an effective member of the sales team?”

No Matter What We Call Them — Users/Leads/Audience/Prospects — they are humans. Humans have to use web sites or apps to do their job or accomplish some task or goal that hopefully leads them to feel good. I led the user experience team at CA Technologies (now Broadcom) in the redesign of CA.com. I joined right at the start of the redesign the huge corporate website. Almost immediately, I set about turning the web property into a member of the CA sales team, focusing on providing the needed information and functionality for prospects to qualify them as CA leads.

Actions

With the help of many teams, I led the UX and content strategy of ca.com to tell people why they should do business with CA and why they need to consider CA’s products. Here are the actions I did to bring a human-centered digital strategy to life on ca.com

Identified the primary personas of the web site as members of enterprise software decision-making teams. I used past internal research, product team customer research, industry research, and the existing web site survey to identify the common personas. Then, using this same research, identified the questions that these personas have during the sales process and how they typically find answers. I found that they look at specific content types. For example, the business decision maker personas relied on videos, events, and case studies while the IT decision makers found answers in spec sheets, feature lists, and product comparisons.

Looked at past user research to find their pain points in their current website experience. The research had showed that there was a clear path to purchase, so with the help of my content strategist, we audited the website and found the large content gaps where the website was not meeting the users’ needs on their buyer’s journey.

Engaged the analytics team to work with my content strategist and find the current content performance by type to identify opportunities for web site optimization. My team member wanted to learn more about data analysis, so I asked our analytics agency to mentor her on a large content analysis of the current product content on ca.com. She did so with gusto and found three insights that enabled me to further validate and set strategy for the ca.com redesign. These three insights also provided the needed data to sway product marketing team members towards the new website strategy.

Based on the information, I felt confident that if we provided these content types and the needed information to support a buyer’s journey for the website audiences, the website could work hard to qualify leads and drive revenue for the company. My KPIs were focused on engagement. The marketing teams drove traffic to the website, but I could make sure that once a user got to CA.com, they would find what they needed, no matter the phase of their journey.

I also extended the strategy to ensure that the website design matched current user behavior on all digital platforms by focusing design to be mobile-first, every page could work as a landing page, structuring the page design to match the marketing funnel with clear calls to action, and ensuring the corporate SEO strategy keywords were present in all copy.

The new design of CA.com web site and pages reflect that journey in a way that makes marketers happy too — all the way down the funnel to sales.

Results

To measure the results of this UX strategy, I asked the analytics agency to focus on three measurements before and after the launch to determine whether or not the strategy worked: bounce rate, engagement by way of asset downloads, and an increase in visits to product pages.

I also engaged a usability testing agency to benchmark

Here’s what they reported 90 days after launch — success!

• 63% increase in total asset downloads, with a 31% increase in case studies, which is a direct result of filling a content gap in the buyer’s journey
• 4 percentage point decrease in bounce rate
• Double-digit increases in visits to key product pages
• 2X increase in key usability metrics like task completion and satisfaction