ABOUT

The existing website for international book publisher DK required a face-lift in keeping with it's revised logo and fresh approach to B2C bookselling.

Working with personas, we tried to get into the mindset of the various users we knew would be in our demographic; a busy mum on the go, predominantly browsing via her phone for Keystage educational books for her children of varying ages; a tech-inexperienced grandparent using older software on a PC looking for Christmas gifts, a teacher looking for free printable children's activity resources working from a school PC or tablet. Collaboratively in our Web Solutions team, we considered responsive vs adaptive design. I came up with design solutions on how to incorporate our DK brand styling (colour palette, typeface choices and hierarchy styling, button styling, real estate proportions and character limits etc), while focusing on heightened contrast and legibility for all devices for older/ visually impaired users (including how the user would expand font sizing manually). I worked with our developer on options for how the design would be handled over device and software versioning and how to keep this as simple as possible visually. I created various versions of interactive lo-fi wireframes to present to our in-house staff-based focus group and worked with their feedback, trialling amended versions of the Beta site.

I created and deployed a soft launch email invitation to an exclusive group of email subscribers (a random selection of a % of our subscriber database were invited and incentivised to try the Beta site and feedback was also requested from them (I did a similar 'VIP review panel' at Elemis when we wanted to garner feedback on specific products for effectiveness and quote fodder for email advertisements and also for the Elemis soft launch). Our Product Manager and Developer monitored the live interactions from the users from their software dashboard (so sorry but I can't remember what the s/w was), keeping an eye on elements like load speeds, traffic thresholds, drop off points etc. Their findings were shared with me and rest of the team where we amended the obvious functional fixes quickly. The feedback varied greatly but also gave insight to how the users were physically using the product that otherwise we may never have realised.

After going live, we continued with a series of follow up emails to our subscriber data base welcoming feedback, targeting users to specific parts of the site so that we could chunk out improvements section by section. The live site received very positive customer feedback, generated new traffic and revenue for the company and helped refresh the brands visibility in the publishing industry.

I also worked as a UX designer on elements of the DK Trip Planner app, and worked with many brands including BBC, LEGO, McDonald's and Disney, adhering to their brand guidelines and workflow approval processes.