Senior Product Designer

Micro Focus is the new owner of HP Enterprise Software as a result of a spin-merge. With this spin-merge the new combined company evolved from a catalog of mostly niche legacy software, to a company with a broad portfolio of apps that can be configured to provide solutions to virtually any industry. The homepage redesign pivots away from a software-centered approach and instead highlights the new Micro Focus portfolio's ability to be leveraged anywhere.

Working closely with the product team we used analytics and heat maps to identify the pitfalls of the old design and how to enhance the experience moving forward. Additionally we conducted user interviews to eliminate any remaining uncertainties that might not be gleaned from our analytical tools. What we determined was that only 10% of users actually engaged with content on the homepage itself (the rest would utilize the navigation, login page, or bounced quickly.) After creating a competitive landscape and thoroughly researching best practice, our team consulted with stakeholders on curating content to better fit our personas. We were looking to increase engagement with C-level personas and practitioners alike. The new curation would shift from expository general information to more thought leadership and success stories centered around our clients, which would resonate better with those personas.

After the content strategy was laid out, the next step was to establish the content layout with low fidelity wireframes. This allows for alignment from everyone and can be socialized to all stakeholders before it is pushed further into visual. User flow was also being broached at this stage with emphasis on what next steps were available to increase users time-on-site.

Once the user flow of the hero area was established and socialized to various product owners it was determined that to keep our workflow agile, we would use the upcoming sprints to establish visual. The branding team was heavily reworking the new combined style of the merged companies which expedited the process by allowing more agnostic design to be applied, which could later be tweaked to fit the branding team's final decisions. During this process I created prototypes which were used to conduct quick user tests with various internal team members and get a quick 20 second candid reaction of their thoughts. Once I gathered a sufficient amount of reactions I use those to refine the interactions so the userflow can be intuited as easily as possible.

Our mobile engagement was quite low, observing the average time on site it was determined that having easily digestible content was preferable to an extensive user flow that a mobile user was more likely to exit out of. Small adjustments were made to the homepage to emphasize the resources that could more easily garner views.

While the content team finishes coordinating efforts with dozens of stakeholders, the future agile process will include: iterations based off of future analytic findings, heat-maps, and most importantly our A/B testing of content that is set up to launch with the new homepage.