We conducted a full website redesign strategy, including a robust discovery, IA & content, template configuration, and personalization. Additionally, we served as UX consultants, training the client team to make updates on their own post-launch.
On my first project at R2i, we provided a wide-ranging website redesign strategy and UX consulting for the worker's compensation insurance company. Their team sought a new website to refresh their digital experience, and fully aware that their expertise in UX/Design was lacking, they brought the R2i team in to help set the foundation for their next website, with focus on a modern web layout, educational thought leadership content, and enablement of self-service for customers.
In this project at R2i, I served as lead UX Strategist and Consultant, both completing preliminary UX strategy work and educating clients on how to maintain that work moving forward.
This project took place over 9 months between 2017 and 2018.
Ingeniux, PPT, Illustrator, Word, User Interviews,
Before we began identifying solutions to the problem, we conducted a 3 month discovery sprint to validate the client team's assumptions about the needed solution.
To inform our strategy, we conducted a wide range of both direct and indirect UX research, intended to gain a holistic view of the customer experience with Chesapeake Employers, including learning who their users are, understanding their current process and which parts of it could be modified/improved, and identifying the set of technologies that enable them to deliver experiences to their customers.
Our discovery research consisted of:
We conducted 2 full days of on-site interviews with the Chesapeake Employers team to better understand the business and the various teams' needs that might be accounted for within the redesign. The main client contacts selected their stakeholder team, making sure to include senior leadership and relevant parties from each business unit to identify current pain points, ideal-state vision, and necessary business requirements. Each interview included 2-3 people of complementary roles from the relevant as a focus group who had polled the rest of their team to understand pain points in their current workflows.
We conducted a UX audit of the existing site to identify alignment with [NNG's 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ "Summary from NNG Website: "Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.""). Our analysis was primarily intended to inform preliminary usability recommendations, which were then further informed by additional UX research findings.
We reviewed their existing website analytics to determine which content was driving users to the site, which content was keeping users on the site, and which content was driving users off site. We also sought to identify key user paths/flows through the site to simplify and increase visibility of those key flows. This review also helped us prioritize our key findings by overall visibility and impact to customers.
Our client shared 3 competitors that they believed were strongest in the field, and wanted us to provide a formal analysis of those companies' websites. In delivering that analysis, we identified that 2 of the 3 competitors identified had similarly outdated website designs, so we expanded the audit to an informal list of 21 competitor/comparator websites to broaden our design inspiration, and collect feedback to guide the design team during concepting.
We conducted phone interviews with 8 users to learn more about how they currently use the site, identify any content needs not yet met, and uncover functionality recommendations. In these interviews, we were also able to validate findings from our secondary research, to ensure those recommendations would actually benefit users.
Through these interviews, we were able to identify major differences in how their government customers do business with Chesapeake Employers, even so much as to use a different name for the division within the company (IWIF).
To begin laying the foundation for our website strategy and keep the team aligned on user needs as we begin building, we consolidated our research findings into personas and journey maps and facilitated discussions with the stakeholder team around these artifacts to ensure overall team consensus.
We built 8 personas for the various audiences who used the Chespeake Employers website. We were unfortunately not able to capture all user groups, so we stuck to the 8 main persona segments that we could identify easily from the interviews. These segments were primarily based on the user's role at their current company, for instance, we had separate personas for Risk Managers and Employers/HR even though they are both typically in charge of safety protocols, injury reporting, and policy renewals, because larger companies often had someone with a specialized role around workplace safety while smaller organizations often employed more of an HR generalist to manage workplace safety as a facet of their role.
We created 2 journey maps for key persona segments to visualize the entire customer experience from initial awareness through injury reporting and into policy renewal. We were able to consolidate the 8 personas into two main customer journeys, as the overall journeys were .
To facilitate a discussion on necessary functionality for the new website, we prepared a PPT deck of website technical recommendations based on our discovery findings.
With an approved strategy, we began to build the information architecture with a focus on well-organized groupings of content labelled in ways users could understand that could scale as the Chesapeake Employers team grew into their new site.
To help build out the sitemap, we took stock of every page we could find within the website ecosystem and provided a template to the client team for auditing, archiving, and updating it all before site launch. Within the content audit document, we included notes for the top 40 pages with the most pageviews to demonstrate the types of information the content team should collect as they're building their work.
During the sitemapping phase, we made names more familiar to users instead of reflective of internal terminology, chunked content into more intuitive and findable groupings, and began to visualize the site's navigation.
We created our content playbook to visualize and agree on content types and page hierarchy without focusing on layout/design. Our content playbook served as a high-level snapshot of each page template in order to get initial client feedback earlier than wireframes and designs, and minimize costly feedback later in the process. Once approved by the client team, this playbook served as a guide for the design team to begin wireframes and visual designs.
We prepared a taxonomy and tagging strategy to enable dynamic content structures throughout the site and begin laying the groundwork for personalization.
Once wireframes were complete, we conducted usability testing on key flows through the new site experience to identify areas for improvement and iterate on the layout as we moved into visual design. Read about our usability tests ➝
Once the wireframes were complete and the designs were underway, we were able to shift UX attention to focus on preparing the content team to begin the website migration.
To ensure all drafted content is consistent with the website brand and strategy, we drafted a document to serve as the entire Chesapeake Employers team's core content strategy for the website, inclusive of goals & KPIs, content topics & themes, CTAs, voice and tone, brand proposition, etc. Because our clients were stronger at writing marketing copy for brochures and not well versed in writing for the web, we included an appendix of 'Writing for the Web' best practices.
To facilitate content gathering and component mapping, we created a content authoring guide for each page template. As the author begins to revise the content based on the Core Content Strategy, the authoring guide serves as a content brief that documents all relevant information needed to complete a piece of content, including assets needed, component selection and character limits, and dynamically populated content that doesn't need to be authored.
To facilitate SEO efforts, we translated our sitemap from a visual format to a spreadsheet that included both the past URL and the proposed URL for the content to make sure page slugs were identified and content hierarchies remained intact.
We identified specific components on the site that could be used to deliver personalized experiences, as well as potential content types to include in those components. Our personalization strategy included:
We recommended the Chesapeake Employers team use a crawl, walk, run approach to ensure that we're providing them with efforts that can be completed easily, while also setting the foundation for larger, integrated efforts in years to come.
We partnered with our client to design a digital front door that simplifies patient access and reduces the barriers to proper care. We also consulted on building a data-informed CX practice across the entire hospital system.
We designed and prototyped a Slackbot that streamlines project onboarding, delivering document summaries and task liststhat help our team find the right information at the right time. Our project tied for third in the 2025 Fearless Purple Hackathon despite an unfinished body of work.
We designed and prototyped an app that assisted heart attack survivors with their recovery through logging, analysis, and effective user interventions.
