Updating the voice of an industry leader.
This project was done while at Catch New York. Catch New York was the marketing agency for IIS. The team members who contributed to this project worked at Catch New York at the time of launch.
Put yourself in the shoes of a trader at the NYSE conducting high-volume transactions where split-second decisions are critical. What would seem like a simple lag in a monitor's live feed could prevent the trade from going through at the correct time, costing consequential losses. Imagine an e-commerce manager that notices a spike in traffic during the holiday season but also an increase in load time costing the company session abandonments and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars – or more – in sales. Why do these mishaps happen? And how can they be prevented?
This is the story about building a website for a company that prevents mishaps like these from occurring.
A global leader in IT solutions.
International Integrated Solutions (IIS) is a NY-based IT solution provider that works with some of the world's largest companies. Although IIS is not well known outside of the industry, for over 25 years, IIS has been one of the most respected and established IT solution providers in the U.S. They provide comprehensive IT solutions from hybrid cloud to managed services solutions for some of the world's most valuable companies. You're able to experience a smooth e-commerce experience because of the work IIS performs behind the scenes. They recently earned Hewlett Packard Enterprise's highest honor, the title of Global Partner of the Year.
The IT industry transforms rapidly, requiring solution providers to continually re-invent themselves to stay relevant. If you don't adapt, you'll be left in the dark. IIS has done an incredible job of shifting with the times and updating its brand image.
Down the rabbit hole.
The discovery phase began with shadowing and interviewing several employees, ranging from leadership positions to junior staff at their Long Island office to understand, among other things, their work, experience, and perspective on the future of the IT industry. It was our first pass at understanding IIS from a beginner's mind.
In parallel, we sent a quantitative survey to IIS' target market to gain a high level of understanding of the industry and purchasing behavior. The results would inform us of a direction to follow and would provide the "whys" behind the answers. Uncovering why things happen is where we can garner the most insight, so we conducted 10 additional one-on-one interviews with people at every level of IIS, from VPs of IT to System Managers.
...as a VP of IT, I want to see a track record of past work so that I can be convinced of the solution provider's reliability and support...
...as a VP of IT, I like to see how the solution provider came in and streamlined a company's production and helped them move forward so that I can understand the process the provider took...
...as an IT executive, I want to make sure that whoever I work with has done something similar in the past so that I can be comfortable with my decision, work through the political mess of selling the company in, and I know that they have experience in my realm...
Relationships.
Position IIS as a business-savvy, ultra-responsive, long term partner that helps empower a client's IT department.
Expertise.
Experience is critical. Focus on communicating IIS's understanding of a wide range of industry verticals, their experience in solving similar, complex problems, and the talent to anticipate/tackle new ones.
Cost & ROI.
Illustrate the tangible and intangible returns that IIS provides. Not everything is a line item.
Risk Reduction.
Tackle the misperception that resellers are less experienced extensions of the OEMs that solely charge at a higher cost.
Marketing & Content.
Create a marketing strategy that utilizes a 'pull' method rather than a 'push' method. Apparent marketing efforts irritate potential customers, so it's time to turn the tables and get them to organically come to us by providing enjoyable and valuable content.
Making sense of it all.
The team was just getting started. It was time to take these insights and execute on them. Combing through the user stories and themes, and initial architecture was sketched. Together with Will (the copywriter), the designers expanded upon these sections into more fleshed out components.
An updated focus.
A significant decision that stemmed from the research was that IIS wasn't perceived as a thought leader. The team needed to change the perception that "resellers," the term for the industry IIS is in, are only the implementers, and not the innovators. In reality, sure, they don't manufacture the machines, but they do design and construct the systems based on their clients' needs. Our solution to combat this was to create a page that would be continuously updated with new, highly relevant, and contextual industry content – videos, podcasts, webinars, articles, and case studies to start. Content would be produced because it's the industry we love, care about, and want others to hear what we have to say – without paywalls or barriers.
As the pages and content began to come together, the sketches were passed to the design and development teams. Fonzie, the art director on this project and Lauren, the lead designer, gathered inspiration for the visual design and started creating a design system. The development team began building the backend of the website. A full case study can be written on the development of the site, but in brief, the team opted to pair a React frontend with a WordPress backend. Many discussions took place around this decision, but we ultimately knew to future-proof the site, regardless of how much extra time was spent learning and creating the API to make the two work together, it was necessary. Kudos to our development team for making it happen.
Testing the content.
It was time to test the initial structure with customers from our target market. The team conducted one-on-one tests via GoToMeeting with five IT industry members in various sectors, from retail to banking. The tests were done using wireframes to allow the testers to focus on content and flow, and avoid any emotional biases to the visual design.
- See if the testers knew what IIS did within 5 seconds of seeing the site.
- Understand how the testers consumed the content and where hiccups occurred.
- Analyze if the testers responded positively or negatively to the content.
The testers were encouraged to have an open dialogue and voice and discuss what they were thinking and feeling. Their candid insights led us to make several structural and content changes. IIS had access to all the test results and user stories created for the website. Open communication was critical, and everyone had shared access to the same information.
The new iistech.com.
It was a proud moment to launch iistech.com. It took a full team effort with a lot of support from all the stakeholders at IIS. And with any launch, the work is far from over. The site is continuously evolving, with new disciplines being added and measured against industry needs.
Consulting
Managed Services
Infrastructure
Hybrid Cloud
Big Data
Security
Mobility
Key Decisions
Content migration.
Much energy was spent getting the content right and assuring its relevance to the audiences. If it's not relevant, then what's the purpose of it being on the site? We unanimously agreed that we wanted to avoid a content migration from their existing website to the new one. Our approach needed to be raw and fresh. Our team created the content from scratch and tailored to the themes of the user stories. Many hours were spent with different IIS team members making sure we spoke about their disciplines correctly.
Tagging system.
The Perspectives page would be the driver of future content. We asked ourselves how we could categorize the content so people could find the information they were seeking more efficiently. The challenge was that many Perspectives cover multiple practice areas. For instance, one Perspective may be about the cloud, disaster recovery, and data migration. Yet, through our conversations with IIS, we found out that many practice areas fall under others. Using the example just mentioned, disaster recovery and data migration can fall under the primary practice area of cloud and big data. So, the solution was to create a color-coded tagging system related to the core practice area spoken about in that Perspective. That color would be the same as the page dedicated to it on another part of the website. The consistency of the system was a significant focus.
Case studies.
During the research, we kept hearing the question, "Have they done work in my industry before?" Sure, we were able to list the industries they've worked with on the website, but we wanted to have more substance behind those claims. We already knew that consumers want to learn about relationships and how a company works, so our decision was to make the case studies on the website, both industry and practice area focused.
Reflections.
The discovery process never ended. On launch day, we kept learning about the IT industry. This website could not have been done without completely diving into IIS' business and spending countless hours with their team going over the information. Their patience and willingness to make sure we understood the information not just for the website but also for our own knowledge, was a significant factor in the success of this website.