Objective
Seeking to improve their overall web presence and review their information architecture, AspenTech requested the help of personas and a content audit to get a better idea of who makes up their audience and how those users could use the updated website to reach their goals.
Solution
Our solution came in four parts:
- Create a set of personas outlining who the website needs to be speaking too.
- Audit the Information Architecture then suggest refinements and improvements.
- Push the created personas through the new website structure.
- Redesign the homepage, industry, solution, and product page templates.
Process
This page outlines the personas part of the project we did. We started with a template persona that had been made recently in our UX department to begin visualizing the detailed audiences we wanted to target. Among the many different audiences AspenTech was trying to reach there were three core groups we felt we could provide deeper information on:
- C-Suite Executives: The extremely intelligent visitors who read very little but are looking for major value propositions to assist their company wide initiatives.
- Directors and Plant Managers: Those high level managers that make new software buying decisions who are always seeking day to day efficiency.
- Software using employees: Employees who are hands on with the asset optimization software actually using it to complete tasks.
AspenTech needed to be able to see how a member of each of their primary audiences would find engagement with the website from their needs being met. Two of the personas shown below, Dia and Dave, show the stark differences in pain points a director may feel compared to an engineer that uses software every day.
When delivering wireframes we combined the wires and user flows to speed up the timeline for the client. What the user flows provided for the client was an understanding into the possible routes their visitors could take through the new website architecture. We indicated reasoning along each screen delivered and also indicated where essential parts of each page may present themselves to each persona.
Presenting wireframes usually is straightforward, but to provide extra detail to the client so they had the ability to walk away with our work and share it internally we provided detailed annotations within the wires. Annotations are normally written in the form of comments on wireframes but with AspenTech there was a need to point directly to why we had designed the pages that way.
Result
The new AspenTech experience homepage experience is a fantastic improvement and can be seen here. So far the homepage and primary navigation are the only changes that have taken place. Make sure to check back later to see more updates! The second to last image below is a before and after of the homepage.
Appendix
Process images can be seen below.
