A Total website redesign for World Trade Centre in Atlanta.
The World Trade Center Atlanta (“WTC Atlanta”) is a not-for-profit member of the global World Trade Centers Association (“WTCA”) network, with 325+ strategic locations around the world. The WTC Atlanta’s mission is to promote and facilitate international trade and investments, providing the access, programming, services, and commercial environment that brings executives, entrepreneurs, governments, NGOs, businesses, and markets together.
Problem Space:
The WTC Atlanta relies on its website as one of the tools to communicate to the international business community as to who, what, how they are globally connected, what services and opportunities they offer, when and where events occur, and how to make contact with the leadership team. However, there is much more information and services that they like to communicate and offer (e.g., White Labels, international news feeds, announcements, photo galleries, business library, Bilateral Partner Organizations, and the soon to launch WTC Atlanta Academy). The current website does not offer dynamic and state-of-art interactivity to accommodate these functionalities this required a complete understanding and redesign from the scratch.
Design Process
The design process that I followed is the five stages of the Design thinking process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Empathize
Why it needs a redesign? After a careful analysis of the WTC Atlanta’s website, the following conclusion were drawn of why it needed a redesign:
The website looks outdated.
There was no proper CTA (Call to Action) on the website. It feels more like an informative website.
There was no trust building up when the clients sees it for the first time as there was no proper information and contact details of various other clients.
The brand values of the company were not clearly visible on the website.
User Research:
Through this research we focused to gain user insights, ideas, and feedback in understanding user’s expectations, and the scope of improvement for the current Atlanta World Trade Center (WTC) website. Using this information to re-develop and re-design the Home Page and Academy Page of the Atlanta WTC website.
Specifically, we will explore:
- How do they use the current Atlanta WTC website?
- How well does the current WTC website work for them?
- Does the current WTC website meet their expectations?
- What functions they might want to see for a new tab focusing on education and training?
Key Areas of Inquiry
1. Their purpose of using the current WTC website.
2. Level of satisfaction with the current WTC website.
3. Types of improvements they wish to see in the website.
4. Features and functions they would like to see in the “Academy” section of the website.
5. Their feedback on the new, improved, re-designed website.
Types of Interview Participants:
President and Founder of a trading company that bridges US companies with buyers and sellers from all around the world.
President and CEO of a consulting company that specializes in solving business challenges, developing operational strategies, and implementing solutions that enable business success
President and CEO of an international consulting company that provides management and technology consulting solutions to businesses all around the globe.
User Research Summary
DEFINE
Identifying Problems in the Current Website
A generic template which is similar to other WTC chapters’ websites.
Overall display and attraction the website provides is not upto the mark.
Proper planning in the usage of the space in a single page and placing the elements appropriately instead of leaving too much blank spaces.
Website should be improved from being highly static to being dynamic in nature.
IDEATE
An information architecture was quickly sketched out for the home page based on the card sort activity results.
VISUALIZE
Since this is an organization that is global we were given the color scheme and the visual references (Font size, Font type)
MOODBOARD AND COLOR INSIPIRATIONS
Paper prototypes
HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS
Home Page
Interactive Map feature
Complete Home page
Academy Page
What’s next?
The design now needed to be tested for feedback and further improvement. The content need to be finalized and sent for the web development after satisfactory iterations.
Thank you for reading.