Around the world, Deloitte Digital looked different. Despite being one global connected studio, there were eight different country-specific sites out there. Combined with diverse social media content, the brand messaging was scattered. Our team was tasked with a comprehensive redesign of the globally recognized corporation's website, aiming to unify the digital presence for a diverse, international audience. The project was spearheaded by a small, agile creative team.
Our team of five creatives consisted of a Creative Director, senior IC, UI designer, UX designer (me) and one junior UX designer. We worked with a development and functional team based across Europe, and eventually brought in a copy writer, content strategist, and project manager. At the start of the project, the creative team consisted of the Creative Director, the junior designer, and me. Getting things spun up at such an early stage was a great lesson for me in managing ambiguity to provide actionable feedback for junior staff.
The project had four key goals:
01
To showcase a global, unified narrative about who we are and what we do to potential clients and job applicants
02
To attract top talent by highlighting the company's culture and caliber of work
03
To showcase the global presence of the studio network
04
To update the visual design to align with the company's new branding strategy
(Click to expand) A selection of some of the varied content representing Deloitte Digital across the world.
The project began with an extensive interview process involving over 30 senior leadership stakeholders from around the globe. These discussions were crucial for understanding the different visions and expectations for the website, ensuring that the redesign would strategically align with the company's goals across various regions.
Overwhelmingly, we heard a need for a website that showcased the caliber of work the studios was capable of producing.
"It should be a true showcase for our work unlike we've ever had before."
"Success is a site that represents us."
Given that potential job applicants were a key audience segment, we also spoke with new hires across the company. A common theme in those conversations was that new hires truly didn't know much at all about the studio network when joining – they figured that out during their initial months on the job.
As a result, we decided that focusing on true stories of our work — what we called work stories — would communicate what we do while showcasing our impact for clients.
Instead of a traditional case study, a story format would allow for us to talk about our work in a way that aligned with Deloitte Digital's new brand, Hello New. The new brand was centered on the idea of bringing about new solutions for clients facing new problems brought about by new technology.
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(Click to expand) Of course, the process of coming to this decision took many conversations and whiteboarding sessions. While we were figuring out the design approach, we were also working out the sequencing of design vs. development cycles, and delivery deadlines.
There were many conversations that ended up with what you see here: a thought process that needed to be translated into something sharable, understandable, and convincing.
To make progress, we had to confront and balance a few limitations. First, there was limited budget available to support the redesign. To ensure that a new site was shipped quickly, there was significant leadership support for re-using drag-and-drop components from another internal website redesign. While doing so would allow us to move quickly, it would seriously compromise on the creative goals of the project. With the guidance of our Creative Director, we knew we had to push back on that. As one stakeholder had said, "if we take the least common denominator approach [to the redesign], we're going to be left wanting."
Another challenge we faced was securing time for design concepting. It isn't much of a stretch to say that on Day 1, we had team members asking for items ready for development. (Their urgency was understandable — a redesign of this scale hadn't been possible for a decade, and there was limited support available). There was a strong desire to get development underway as soon as possible — but we needed to ensure that we had a clear design direction first. Without that, there would be no strategy behind any components that would be built.
After weeks of discussions and explorations (and bringing on a very talented project manager to coordinate a plan ), we were able to propose two paths forward.
In one, we would showcase new work stories (but only a few) and pilot them in only a few countries. Doing so would allow us to stick to initial go-live dates, but the unified global digital presence would have to wait. Analytics and feedback from this pilot would determine the focus of the next phase of work: changing the work story format, adding more stories, or adding different kinds of content.
With the second path, we would migrate existing content to the new site from across the global studio network, creating a global digital expression of the new brand. In doing so, we would establish a collection of redesigned content that all markets could use. This path would require a later go-live date.
With our stakeholders' input, we chose path two. We designed modular components that translated the Hello New brand to a digital environment. These components included things like a contact form, an unordered list of articles, and an interview transcript template. We used existing content from the old US site first, as that would be the first global domain to go live with the new design.
(Click to expand) A sample of some of the modular page elements we designed.
In the time since, the redesign has actually extended to cover the first path as well. There are no longer a myriad of different regional sites out there — all locations are able to use the same design, with the same unified brand elements, to tell their own localized work stories.
