CA Technologies.
How do you make a 30-year-old technology brand show up like a breakthrough startup? The secret is in the sauce; brand principles, messaging and visual overhaul. Building from this primer, we developed one heck of a strategy to inform how the new face of CA.com would manifest itself.
There was a point in time when I had no idea who ITDMs (IT decision makers) and BDMs (business decision makers) were. Several months later, these acronyms (and eventually personas) would be fully ingrained into the team’s psyche that no page would go unturned without the lens of ‘Cloud Cassie’ or ‘IT Imran’ having been taken into account.
“People get easily lost when looking for products and solutions. The product hierarchy in the main menu is too deep and contains redundancy and ambiguity. Does “Mobile Security” go under Mobile or Security? Is that a solution or a type of product? Users don’t know.”
Yes, there were problems with the current site. Dead links. A bloated global navigation. An inundated, overpriced, titan of a content management system. But the biggest problem was not only the messaging or the inconsistent design language, it was the simple fact that people were getting lost when looking for products. People who were looking to buy.
We took a look at each pain point, broke them down into opportunities and looked towards the best industry examples. Any migrated content within the several tens of thousand of pages on the current site met their maker in a keep, fix or kill matrix. Then, persona-based workflows were developed, a strategic narrative was put into place and wires were developed based on all of the above.
Working closely with the creative teams, we integrated our designs into the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) framework that would eventually do away with the need for Photoshop comps or wireframes altogether when building new pages.
Slowly, but surely, we migrated a site the size of Texas if every page were a house* to its new home, going through an extensive process of vetting with internal stakeholders, our partners and working in agile to lay out a modern experience we all felt even our mothers could use. Whether or not they understood what API management was, is another question.
*Okay... okay, this might’ve been a stretch. In 2014, there were 10,426,080 housing units in Texas. Texas is pretty damn big. We migrated nearly 10,000 pages, which wasn’t bad for a small team’s effort.