The site looked like a catalogue. The company felt like a community.
Methods & deliverables
- Stakeholder workshops
- Proto-personas
- Information architecture
- User journeys
- User stories
- Interactive prototype
- WordPress content upload
- Accessibility considerations
- Pre-launch QA
Context
A Swiss industrial manufacturer with operations worldwide came to us to redesign their B2B corporate website, live in English and German. The existing site was structured entirely around the product catalogue, what the company sells, listed and organised the way an internal team would file it, not the way a visitor would look for it.
Why this mattered
The workshops repeatedly surfaced a gap between the organisation's internal identity and the way the existing site represented it. A company with a strong culture and international scope was showing the world a flat product list instead. That gap became the real design problem, beyond any initial list of pages to redesign.
Constraints
There was no budget or timeline for primary research with external users, customers, applicants, or suppliers. To work around that, my team ran five structured workshops involving seven internal departments and built proto-personas from what emerged. This provided a broad internal view of the site's audiences and needs, but it was still based on proxies rather than direct research with external users.
What I discovered
Different departments described different functional needs, but the workshops converged on the same broader issue: the site did not reflect the organisation behind it. That recurring pattern helped turn a general concern into a clear design direction.
Key decisions
The information architecture flipped the site's logic. Instead of leading with the product offer, it led with identity first, then what the company does. Fewer, richer destinations replaced a fragmented list of shallow pages, and a Knowledge Hub pulled together documents, certifications, and case studies that had been scattered with no home.
Trade-offs
Building proto-personas from internal workshops instead of from real customers, applicants, and suppliers was the right call given the constraint, but it's still a trade-off worth naming. Internal teams are good at describing what they need from a website. They're a weaker proxy for how an outside applicant or a first-time visitor actually behaves once they land on the page.
Solution
Four journey maps covered the highest-priority scenarios, from a job applicant evaluating culture before applying to a supplier trying to locate documents, tracing the emotional arc across the site's touchpoints rather than just the click path. Each journey turned into user stories for the development handoff, with the reasoning behind each requirement written in, not just the requirement itself.
The visual direction aimed to feel specific to the organisation rather than like a generic template. The prototype covered desktop and mobile and was reviewed with stakeholders before handoff.
We then uploaded the final English and German content into WordPress, carrying the information architecture and content decisions into the actual CMS rather than stopping at prototype handoff.
Before launch, I reviewed the WordPress implementation for layout fidelity, responsive behaviour, interaction patterns, and cross-browser consistency. Accessibility considerations were included in that review where implementation choices affected structure, navigation, content, and interaction. This was part of the wider implementation QA, not a formal accessibility audit.
Impact
The redesign connected structural decisions to named audience needs, giving the organisation a shared reference for future choices. The prototype was reviewed with stakeholders and carried into development, while the WordPress implementation was checked against the agreed design before launch.
My role
I led design on this project, working alongside a larger team that included a content team working in parallel, given the international scope and two-language site. I designed and ran five stakeholder workshops involving seven departments, synthesised the findings, and guided my team's work through information architecture, journey mapping, and prototyping. I coordinated with content and development and ran the pre-launch QA review.
What I'd do differently
I'd bring real users into the process from the start, as a discovery tool, not a final validation step. Talking directly to applicants, customers, and suppliers shapes which questions you ask in the first place, not just whether the answers you got were right.