Marshfield Labs provides clinical research organizations and veterinary practices with comprehensive test results and has locations throughout the midwest.
Team
1 UX Lead, 2 Sharepoint Developers, 1 Visual Designer
Duration
4 Months
My Role
Designer, Project Manager
Website
The redesign of the Lab’s web presence had bit of a rocky past riddled with project management oversight, budget restraints and prior differences between leadership and marketing. Needless to say, the design team as well as developers were wary of the road ahead.
For this project, I was afforded a unique opportunity to act as both designer and project manager. Knowing the challenging relationship that our stakeholders had with the team, I lead this effort though very formalized standards with guidance from my UX Team Lead.
The completed redesign moved the client onto Sharepoint 2013 with an updated visual design and a responsive experience that focuses on delivering needs for the new (and returning) customer.
Key Decisions
The Marshfield Labs staff expressed concern that their site was not appearing on popular search engines. We researched competitors keyword strategy and common queries using Google trends to properly name and tag each page and unify the language seen in buttons and titles to better rank in search.
Key terms such as “clinical labs” “veterinary labs” and “laboratory Wisconsin” rank marshfieldlabs.org in the top 5 results of listings across Google, Bing and Yahoo as of February 2016.
Overall lift to the site from search engines has been increasing at a rate of 3% per cycle.
The existing branding and visual design of the labs was outdated and no longer aligned with the guidelines set forth by the Marshfield Clinic Health System. Using cues from existing branding and color theory, a new visual language was created that was intended to be easy, valuable, and genuine.
Our team spent extensive time before launch and at regular follow-up sessions to educate the Labs staff on how to maintain their content pages effectively.
Deployed Adobe analytics integration on the site to learn more about what their visitor behavior in order to better inform future business decisions.
Kind words from the project team.
“I have worked with dozens of project managers in my career, and Melissa was right up there with the best. By the way she performed, it seemed like she already had a lot of experience with project management.”
-Bill Hogg, Sharepoint Architect
Early concept sketches of portal navigation.
Detail of home landing page on tablet showing finalized navigation with drop-down interaction.