DAT : Marketing Website Overhaul
eComm marketing website, Desktop & mobile, B2B
Role - Sr. UX Designer
User Experience (Web), Cross-functional Collaboration, Storytelling, Design Systems, Information Architecture, Art Direction, Content Strategy, UI (Web) Design
The Opportunity
DAT has been at the cutting edge of the spot-market freight industry for 30+ years. Their products facilitate $150 billion in freight market transactions annually. But recently, the competitive landscape has evolved, seeing companies enter what has historically been a slow-to-change market with new tech offerings and approaches.
DAT approached us and asked us to help them fix their marketing website. They had noticed that potential customers looking to sign up for products and services were consistently dropping out of the purchase funnel. They needed a quick fix that wouldn’t impede other high-priority initiatives.
I helped DAT evaluate and redesign its web presence to maintain its position as the original pioneer and industry leader in the market.
Key Challenges:
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High drop-out rates.
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New brand guidelines had not been successfully implemented.
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Their old site felt technical and out of date, they wanted to portray a modern, personable, and customer-focused brand.
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The 300+ pages of their old site had inconsistent layouts and lacked information hierarchy, customers often got bogged down in the content.
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Users had expressed confusion around the main navigation and site architecture.
Discovery and information architecture
I conducted an initial experience audit which exposed several disjointed and outdated pages on their website, along with inconsistent language and UX issues on their feature comparison page and in the sign-up flow. I also conducted audits of their direct and indirect competitors along with aspirational company websites.
I produced various interaction models to demonstrate different business approaches based on how they wanted to be perceived within the industry. I overhauled their site navigation both in the main menu and through incorporating best UI practices throughout the new pages. I then followed with low-fidelity wireframes of a new product-focused funnel demonstrating the new information architecture approach.
Results:
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Following our recommendations, DAT overhauled its website which immediately resulted in a 33% increase in customer acquisition and conversion.
A new design system and process
In addition to these changes I also led the visual refresh of their marketing site based on their new but unused branding guidelines. With a warmer feel, improved photography, and customer-centric presentation our updates resulted in an easier-to-manage web experience with streamlined navigation, a robust set of web templates that the DAT marketing team can quickly deploy, and a customer experience authentic to the brand.
Development and deployment
As pages became ready for launch I worked closely with the dev team, running QA and redlining updates or changes to be made.
Results:
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The DAT team was left with a modular design system with templates for every page used across their site, reducing guesswork and production time for any changes to be made.
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I facilitated a process for the product and marketing teams to work in parallel to produce and track the current content for each of the 300 pages across the site. This new content strategy and backlog streamlined communication between departments and is now utilized for any future updates and changes.
