Paper

Best Practice – Co-design of a multinational corporate website

Success strategies for the design of multinational corporate websites

Reading time: approx. 4′ 29″

Adaptive Design System

Co-Creation & Participatory Design

Digital Ecosystems

Digital Transformation

Experience Design

Reading Time & Pyramidal Preception

Rollout-Strategy & Digital Roadmap

Training and Empowerment

Universal Design & Inclusion

User Research & Need Analysis

Methodology

Co-creation is an effective method to actively involve stakeholders in the conception and design process of digital products such as websites. This method, also known as co-design, participatory design or generative method, is based on the principle of equal partnership between future users and companies during product development. In co-creation, we view the user not just as a passive informant, but as an active co-creator. In contrast to traditional company-driven approaches, co-creation allows customers to shape their product according to their preferences, which creates real added value.

Successful co-creation requires the selection of suitable methods to transfer stakeholder requirements into the website design.

A best-practice example is used to describe how co-creation can be used in complex website projects. The aim is not only to develop a high-quality website UX, but also to reduce the high project costs and times that often occur in such cases. Designers take on organisational, communicative and creative tasks in all project phases.

Project description

The project focussed on the relaunch of the website of the internationally active German seed specialist KWS SAAT SE. The aim was to design the website in line with customer and market requirements and to seamlessly integrate new digital services and tools into the product portfolio. Co-creation was to ensure that the needs of the stakeholders were incorporated into the website design. Customer-centricity in co-creation was mainly achieved through the sales persons, 80% of whom are farmers themselves and therefore represent the future website visitors.

Quantity, quality and time

At the start of the project, only 10.5 months were available until the website launch. We had over 380 individual subpage types, and the existing content was diverse, redundant and not optimised for the web. The website was not only to be revised from a UX perspective, but also consolidated in terms of content.

Analogue mindset of the stakeholders

For years, stakeholders had simply copied content from print media to the online presence. There was a lack of understanding for the optimal implementation of corporate design in the digital environment and the motivation for digitalisation was limited.

Internationale Business Units (BUs)

Over 80 people were stakeholders in this project and the international BU structures had to be integrated. Each BU had its own products, goals and priorities, which led to silo thinking.

Integration of an external IT service provider

The designs were iterated with the customer and then handed over to an external IT company for programming.

Sustainable co-creation with the editors

The farmers and sales managers were supposed to be responsible for filling the content. However, the editors were often unexperienced in dealing with websites.

The procedure in this project consisted of a total of twenty international workshops, which initially involved the heads of the BUs, then the sales experts and finally the editors. The same target images were communicated to all stakeholders in various design phases in order to develop a common website vision.

Target images

The target images focused on dividing the content in half and optimising the information architecture in line with user behaviour on the web. We reorganised the website structure according to relevance and user frequency in order to clearly separate product and service information while still linking them logically. This helped digital tools and services to be located more easily.

Analysis

We carried out an SEO analysis to find out what content the farmers were actually interested in. Based on these findings, we created personas and used them in content workshops to prioritise content. The result was a consequent halving of all website content through precise content summarisation and removal of redundant information.

Development

In layout workshops, we designed start and landing pages to ensure the optimal placement of information. Prototypes and clickable low-fidelity prototypes were integrated into the design process in order to check and iteratively optimise the design.

We developed a migration concept to enable agile programming and iterative implementation in the CMS. Programming was done in stages, with the design office building the website in the CMS directly after each stage. The go-live of the website was delayed by 7 months and only 45% of the content from the previous version was transferred to the new website, saving high translation costs.

This project made it clear that designers are not only responsible for the design, but also have to take on organisational and communicative tasks. The aim was to halve the content while doubling the informative value. Visualisation and rapid prototyping are crucial in order to involve stakeholders and develop solutions. Choosing the right tools in co-creation is crucial, and the communication culture and dialogue between stakeholders are of great importance.

Conclusion

Overall, this project shows how co-creation can be used successfully in complex website projects to increase quality, reduce project costs and times and create a shared vision. The findings are applicable to similar projects, especially in areas where an analogue mindset prevails.

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https://doi.org/10.18420/muc2018-up-0296

Published in

Mensch und Computer 2018 – Usability Professionals

Year

2018

Authors

Oliver Gerstheimer, Gesa Nolte, Sören Winkelmann, Romy Kniewel