APRIL - MAY 2023
I helped SpazioDati create a new company website that would showcase them in the best way and help attract new employees.
Summary
Services
- Information Architecture
- Benchmarking
- Wireframing
- Website design
- QA testing
Deliverables
- Wireframes
- Website (made with Wix.com)
Wins
- A new, up-to-date and easy to maintain website for SpazioDati
- Dedicated content for prospective hires, the target users of the website.
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Addressing Legacy Challenges: Overhauling an Outdated Tech Company Website
SpazioDati is a former startup, known for creating Atoka.io, the lead Sales Intelligence platform in Italy. Despite having joined Cerved Group a few years earlier, the website still strongly reflected the “startup feel” of the earlier days. But it wasn’t just about UI: when the careers team approached me, they shared with me two pain points that needed to be addressed:
- There was no content aimed at prospective employees: the company had been growing steadily and wanted to attract new talent by showing its environment and most importantly talk about its tech stack. New talent was meant to be the main visitor of the new website.
- The website didn’t have any content related to the company’s culture and values: This meant that SpazioDati wasn’t able to truly showcase its way of working to the outside world.
In order to address these challenges, before designing I carried on the following activities:
- Studying the current website
- Doing a benchmark evaluation of competitors’ websites
- Interviewing recent hires to gather strengths as well as pain points.
Evaluating the status quo
The previous website was made of 3 pages:
- the Home page, which contained a few blocks about SpazioDati’s products and being part of Cerved Group
- the Team page, with a picture wall of all employees
- the Open Positions page, which at this point had been the only way for prospective employees to know more about working at the company.
Apart from key content being missing, the minimal UI was utilizing the company’s colors in an outdated way and was in need of a good refresh!
I also took the opportunity to visit the websites of those companies that the PO identified as competitors in the context of hiring, to see how they were telling their own story and find the strengths within the pages dedicated to prospective employees. The key positive points from the competitors’ websites were:
- Strong branding and message throughout the website
- Dedicated technical content, also in the form of a blog
- Presence of “careers” pages with up to date team pictures as well as explanations on the company’s culture and values, plus glimpses of what working there is like
Involving new hires in the process
Together with the PO, I interviewed the last 4 hires in that previous year in order to discover:
- the perceived value of the company from those who had been there only for a short period of time;
- opinions about strengths and weaknesses of the current website in the context of the hiring process.
The company’s strengths that emerged during the interviews were:
- the approach to new technical challenges
- the technical skillset and agile metohodology visible within teams
- the “startup” feel, which makes the company feel young as well as unique withing Trentino
On the other hand, the website’s perceived weaker points were:
- a lack of clarity on the company’s products as well as objectives
- suboptimal navigation
- outdated UI
The preliminary research and analysis confirmed the pain points shared by the project stakeholders and helped me shape the future website’s structure and content.
Solution
How we did it
After having conversations with the stakeholders and taking into account the discovery activities, I decided on:
- creating dedicated content for new hires, in particular a Careers page as well as a Tech Stack section;
- sharing more information not only on the company itself, but also on its products in order to help those coming from outside to get a better idea of what SpazioDati does.
I therefore started brainstorming on the sitemap, starting from grouping the content into related sections. After a few iteration, this was the final result:
In parallel, I worked with our Graphic Design intern to:
- create updated photos of the office, as well as of individual team members, to include in the new website
- decide how to revamp SpazioDati’s brand within the new website
After having a rough outline of the content and of the website’s structure, I used Figma to create low-fidelity versions of the final pages, which helped me create an improved page structure and visualize the content within the pages.
Since we needed to implement the website in an easy, no-code way, I proposed we use Wix.com to create and host the website itself. Therefore after creating the lo-fi wireframes, I went straight to Wix to evaluate the tool more closely and experiment with a template-less draft. After several iterations, I was able to publish the 1st version.
To validate it, I sought the feedback of the stakeholders, as well as of the current employees to evaluate whether the new website was reflecting the company’s culture and values.
The final product
Key takeaways
The benefits of a user-centered approach
By taking into account the feedback from the newest hires as well as seeking feedback from the rest of the company after launch helped make sure that
- The content would be tailored to the target users
- The true essence of SpazioDati was shining through the content and the UI
A good IA structure is key in content-first websites
By starting from the content and by using affinity mapping and card-sorting techniques, I was able to create an optimized structure for the website which could be beneficial for navigation, which was one of the previous website’s pain points
Next steps
If I had to keep improving on the website, I would:
- Expand the About page to include the story of the company, which is also tied closely to company culture;
- Get feedback from true potential hires to validate the content of the Careers page further.