IAPI

Project Overview

IAPI is the representative body for Irish advertising agencies. They are the public voice for their industry in Ireland and provide events and training for anyone in, or looking to get into the field of advertising.
They wanted to redesign their website for a number of reasons which included;

• Improving brand perception among users; IAPI represents top ad agencies in Ireland, needs to represent the best in design, content.
• Improving day to day admin of site; CMS currently difficult to manage, confusing for users
  
• CMS pains: restrictive page templates, images need to be specific dimensions (different depending on page) requiring a lot of photoshop work.

Goals

The goals for this project were to create a unified brand, bringing micro-sites together under one brand. Creating a site that looks great and promotes the industry both internally and to encourage students to pursue a career in advertising.

Some of the main areas of focus were; 

• Highlighting key content that is currently buried; video, photos
• Improving usability / UX for key areas such as training / events / jobs
• Clear and easy navigation; signpost key areas better, address confusing navigation (jobs; members vs non-members etc)
• More flexibility around page templates / layouts (training & events in particular)

Research

The first step I took was to create a site map of the current website to give an overview of what their current website looked like. This would allow me to compare it to the new site map I would create after reviewing their analytics and determining what sections are not getting enough traffic, are underperforming or are too hard to find.
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Next I did a complete audit of their website. I looked at analytics to identify important/high traffic areas, desktop/mobile split, traffic source split/importance. This work was split  between myself and the Head of web, each of us took a section and discussed our findings after each section was completed.
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Using the analytics we were able to identify how much traffic each section gets i.e. how important and prominent this content should be, noting that it may still be important, but has low traffic which would be then highlighted as a visibility issue to solve. We discovered what is the most important content in that section, where does traffic come from? Which channels are important, which ones are underperforming.
By sorting the lists by exits we were able to see which pages people are leaving, asking ourselves should they be leaving from those pages? Sorting by average time to get a rough idea of engagement with the content, identifying which are low and high and asking ourselves why?
We would then Identify funnels and conversion rates for each section so we can set a benchmark i.e. spot any large drop offs, low conversions for high traffic etc.

Findings

Our Key findings were;

• Their traffic came mostly from desktops but mobile was on the rise in the past year.
• The vast majority of people accessed the website during the week between 9-5.
• Jobs were by far the most popular section of the website.
• Organic traffic was performing well but social traffic was lacking.
• Content, for example their images and videos, was siloed away and not being used as effectively as it could have been.

Workshop

After compiling all of the findings into a deck, we met with the client and presented our findings, while asking questions about certain areas and we gave our initial recommendations. We showed them the new site map structure we had created which would improve the user experience and discoverability of siloed content and sections which were important but were not getting enough traffic. We discussed their target audience and developed personas by constructing empathy maps.

Wireframes

The Head of Web took the lead on creating the wireframes for each page and each block. We worked together to discuss different layouts and elements which would need to appear on each page and where they could be re-used across the site. We created a list of blocks and added a functionality description next to them to explain the function to the developer.

These blocks were then put together to form full pages in wireframes and were linked together in InVision to create a prototype of the website. 

Visual Design

The Design Lead met with the clients to establish a visual direction. She then took the wireframes and created completely new and improved visuals for the website, making it more modern and professional.

Results

The results of this project was an updated and modern website, reflecting the professionalism and talent surrounding advertising in Ireland. The new structure laid out the important areas in a clear and concise manner while removing the siloed content and highlighting photos and videos across the website.