Redesigning Giacom's portals | Fluent Interaction

Overview

As a result of bringing acquired businesses together, Giacom had a very fragmented user experience across four different portals.

For the first stage of Giacom’s experience transformation, we brought the portals together under one unified design. This delivered a streamlined and refreshed look and feel for their customers, showing all of Giacom’s combined offers in one place for the very first time, driving increased awareness and engagement on Giacom’s full product set.

Research services

Usability testing

Online testing

Survey

Data & analytics

Competitor analysis

Design services

Rapid prototyping

UI & responsive design

Information Architecture

Design system

The challenge

A unified brand for 4 portals looking and working inconsistently

Following recent acquisitions, Giacom ended up with a very diverse set of products, each with their own visual style and branding. This was harming brand awareness and opportunities to cross-sell products across the different portals.
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The portals were completely separate with different experiences and an inconsistent look and feel across all portals making it difficult for partners to service their customers efficiently.
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Overall there was no sense of a unified organisation, features had been duplicated creating an inconsistent experience and making it difficult to cross-sell or self-serve across multiple product types.
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Giacom set us the challenge of creating a new look and feel that would cater for their existing 4 portals and bring multiple brands under one.

Our approach

A holistic approach to create a user-centred experience for all products

We took a holistic approach to this challenge. We included insights from trends and best practices, analytics, user research, and existing knowledge within the business and used these to inform the new designs.
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Our team went through a prioritisation exercise with Giacom’s product owners across the different templates and features, and took an iterative design approach.
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A unified look and feel also required a unified way of navigating the portals, which we tackled with an information architecture review across the portals.
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Once the initial visuals were ready, we tested the designs with existing partners to gather feedback and refine any potential barriers or challenges to them using the portals in their day-to-day work.

A unified look and feel also required a unified way of navigating the portals, which we tackled with an information architecture review across the portals.

A broad range of insights

To get a comprehensive understanding of the market, we carried out a visual and a functional competitor review. We collated existing user insights to identify any known issues that could be solved with the visual reskin. We used analytics to understand where people were clicking and engaging (or not) with the current pages.

By considering a wide range of data, we felt we had established a robust starting point to allow us to tackle a range of 30+ different templates and pages.

An example of our insights model being used to determine what screen sizes to design for.

Prioritising for the most impact and coverage

We identified the key pages across the 4 portals to create templates for. These were the pages that contained common components that could be reused throughout, such as tables, dashboard widgets, filters etc. As we went through this process, we looked at the UX and user flow to tackle potential improvements.

We also considered what we knew about usage data and research insights around which areas were particularly relevant to partners.

The table template design for the Giacom portal.

Continuously testing and iterating throughout the project

Highlights

One-to-one interviews with 40+ partners
Mix of surveys and online tests
Conference research with potential partners

While the design work was progressing, we carried out one-to-one usability tests with existing users of the platform to understand if the changes were an improvement and whether there were any issues. We also carried out an online test to reach a wider set of participants for feedback.

Research confirmed that a unified design builds familiarity, making working across different portals more efficient for users. People commented it was more pleasant to work in the portals when seeing the clean and modern look and feel.

We also identified some challenges around account access that needed addressing and a couple of pointers on improving some of the visual hierarchy for the data-heavy pages.

“

I doubt very much that any other agency could have delivered what Fluent delivered. Their professionalism, creativity, and expertise is a rare combination, represents great value, and positioned Giacom successfully on the path to having the best digital experience in the sector.

Paul McCabe • Chief Digital Officer

Our thoughts

We got a lot of satisfaction from seeing not only the portals in a fresh and consistent look and feel but simultaneously having the Giacom team come together as one company. Research with their partners was essential to refine the designs and make sure they were fit for purpose and easy to adapt to for resellers, working in a demanding and rapidly evolving industry.

An Marien, Lead UX Researcher

This project was exciting as everyone on the team — from senior stakeholders to product managers to developers — was eager and worked tirelessly to make the unification a success. Their digital products initially felt very different, so seeing them look and feel a part of one brand proved the power of design to me and everyone else on the team.

Sarah Lallemand, Senior UX Designer

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