Impec Group Site Refresh

A site refresh for Impec Group, an integrated facilities management company in the Bay Area.

TIMELINE

8 months

ROLE

Sole designer, UX researcher, front-end developer

TEAM

Marketing director, content strategist, data analyst

TOOLS

Figma, Photoshop, Wix, WordPress, FlowMapp, Google Analytics

IMPACT

Led refresh, conducted 6 stakeholder interviews, Migrated site to WordPress, Shipped new site

BEFORE

Too many different colors and fonts
High bounce rates due to lack of page CTAs

AFTER

Simplified colors and fonts with new brand style guidelines
Added relevant CTAs for each page
Increased responsiveness for phones, tablets

STEP 1: RESEARCH

What prompted this website refresh?

With the recent acquisition of a new company in late 2020, Impec Group wanted to raise brand awareness for their new bundled service offerings which required refreshing the outdated website to reflect our new modern workplace solutions.

The pandemic slowed down in person networking so we sought to drive greater engagement and generate client leads to help our staffing division reach more job applicants.

Who is our target audience?

Based on interviews with internal and external stakeholders, we set up six personas that we referred to throughout the entire site refresh process.

Meet our Six Personas:

Garrett the facility manager searching for operations and maintenance services
Laura the director of finance looking for low cost and efficient solutions
Ben the architect aiming to create an engaging and comfortable workplace
Rachel the people operations manager searching for the best workplace talent
Oliver the workplace technologist and space planner hoping to optimize the workplace
Hannah the project manager on the hunt for another relocation and construction project

STEP 2: USER FLOW

How can we simplify our site map?

With our user personas in mind, I used FlowMapp to envision their current journey via a site map.

In this original site map, the pink box represents the page we removed because it was an outdated service.

The edited site map uses green boxes to show added pages. The two main pages are below:

"News" tab for thought leadership and monthly newsletter
"Life at Impec Group"page for prospective employees

Testing the New Site Map:

Using a technique called hierarchical task analysis, I organized the refined site map in Figma hierarchically to check whether all users could complete website tasks within a maximum of two clicks. The website tasks are as follows:

1. Reach out to the correct contact for sanitization services
2. Explore our staffing services and request staffing for your company
3. Apply to an internal Impec Group job
4. Read our latest monthly newsletter
5. Follow us on social media

STEP 3: PROTOTYPING

First Prototype:

Based upon the new site map, I wireframed an updated website design in Figma which is linked below.

Subsequent Changes:

When implementing the above design on our existing Wix platform, I made the following changes based on internal feedback for better metrics tracking, thought leadership and brand consistency.

For better visitor tracking, we gave each case study its own page instead lumping them together
Added a "Recommended White Papers" section to the General News tab
Changed color scheme for "Contact Us" page and "Return to Work" page to include a cool blue color

Why switch to WordPress?

Greater professionalism with consistently branded templates and built-in responsiveness
Better plug-in integration for more SEO insight and marketing analytics for lead generation
More options for design customization such as adding icons to dropdown menus

STEP 4: FINAL EXPERIENCE

Adding Bells & Whistles

🇪🇸 Adding the Google Translate feature made our site accessible to our majority Spanish speaking
employee base

📰 We added third party podcasts about facilities management and corporate real estate to our "News" section to accompany our monthly newsletter and blog

🖼️ Photos in our testimonials brought our services to life through clients success stories

Visual Design:

These visuals were inspired by the colors and fonts used in our logo, specifically our purple, gray and orange shades. We also added mint and brown for lighter shades to foster a sense of biophilia on our website to reflect the plant presence within our physical work spaces.

Project Reflection:

Through this experience, I learned firsthand about the value of starting with template design and then tweaking with custom code when needed, instead of starting by manually dragging or custom coding everything. This was a lesson in learning how to work smarter instead of harder, which is important in this age of automated design.

Ultimately, it was super rewarding to see the impact of this redesign firsthand when I heard positive feedback from user interviews and observed how the impression and lead counts increased.

You can check out our live site here!