Case Study

TEAM SIZE

8 (1 Web Professional (myself), 3 Marketing Staff, 1 Senior Vice President, 1 Director of E-Marketing, 1 Back End Developer, 1 IT Project Manager)

GOALS

To rebrand GGP's then-current corporate site with the new identity quickly.

DEPENDENCIES

The new site needed to be timed with the emergence from bankruptcy therefore it was a fast project. The changes to the in-house custom content management system needed to be few.

AUDIENCE

News media, internal and external sales and leasing departments, shareholders, shoppers and prospective employees.

PROCESS

1. Discovery: Meetings with the team to discuss the scope of the project. Because of limitations set on the amount of changes we could make to the site, there was very little that could be done other than rebrand the site. Therefore, the information architecture would remain the same.
2. User Experience: Developed wireframes based on the layout of the original site, the content management system and the time that was allotted for back-end development. This phase included presentations and reviews. At this time, the wireframes were shared with the back end developers.
3. Creative: Created comps based on the approved wireframes. This phase included presentations and reviews.
4. Front End Development: Worked with my team to execute the approve design as an HTML site, including CSS and JavaScript.
5. Back End Development: Collaborated with the back end developers, reviewing their work, addressing issues that arose in the transition of the files from HTML to .NET.
6. Approval and Launch

THOUGHT PROCESS

There were limitations put on the amount of user experience work that could be performed. That made the task more difficult than other projects that I've worked on.

User Experience: The site needed to remain generally the same with new creative. Recommended changes including the addition of photography of GGP properties, additional space for promoting corporate programs or events on the home page and mega-menus to allow visitors a single click to content. The old site utilitzed a great deal of Flash for its interface and even navigation. Removing that was crucial for speed of loading, SEO and even maintenance.

Creative: Following the new corporate branding, I looked at how far we could distance ourselves from our past. The original site was black and very hard-edged. But the new logo was clean and sophisticated with a geometric feel. I chose a white background to suggest the freshness of the "new GGP", used gray wherever I could to give it a more sophisticated feel, and added orange as a link/call-to-action color which would add to the light and fresh feel. Integrating close-cropped and high-quality images suggested what the company did while not taking up the majority of the browser window.

USER TESTING

The site was put through user testing a year after launch. While there were concerns, the majority were from a content perspective and not the overall site itself. The only major UX concern was a drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the window showing a list of all 120 GGP malls in alphabetical order. My recommendation was to implement a live search feature instead in which the user would type either the state or mall name into a search box and get suggested results (either malls with names matching the query string or all of the malls in a state matching the string).

OUTCOME

The site was launched on-time and achieved the goal, which was to rebrand the site. The additions and changes to the experience enhanced the site and the feedback both from user testing and employees was overall positive.