ExcellaLabs

2017

www.excellalabs.com

A showcase of Excella Consulting's work and community involvement. 

UX Designer

Team

UX Design: Hareem Mannan & Lindsay Boylan | Visual Design: Trish Willard | UX Manager: Dawn Barton

Goal

Create a website to showcase Excella’s work and community involvement.

  • In order to do this, we needed to understand which personas would be contributing to and viewing our site.

Methods

Competitive analysis, user interviews, persona creation, wireframing, high fidelity design, developer asset handoff

Tools

Sketch, RedPen, InVision, Zepplin, Visual Studio Code, white boards, and a million personal pizzas

MVP

A single home page with an about section, featured events, what's happening in the community, talks Excellians have given, as well as links to current popular blog posts on excella.com.

Groups interviewed

Partners, marketing, industry practice leads, service area leads, all level employees, potential recruits, recent new-hires.

Personas Identified

People who contribute to Open Source Software

Goals

  • Space for collaboration between devs outside and at Excella

  • Finding a list of all current OS projects

    • And ones that actively need contributions

  • Showcase of meet ups and other things we’re apart of

Motivations

  • Frequently update projects

  • Blog posts

  • Place for code and related blog posts

Pain points

  • What we currently have doesn’t showcase meet up that we host/present at

  • Often wonder how they can get involved

  • Often two separate locations for overview/deep dive

People who are looking for a job

Goals

  • See a showcase of what we’re currently working on or have in the past

  • Technical: deep dive of what we’re working on

  • Non-technical: general overview

Motivations

  • Blog posts

  • Live demos

  • Thought leadership

Excellians

Goals

  • Have a single place to send people

Motivations

  • Want to showcase the work Excellians do, but also important to show how awesome the people are

Pain points

  • Don’t have a solid, single place to point potential recruits, clients, etc

  • No ‘front-end’ to our current excellalabs GitHub, hard to point non-tech people here

People who want to buy our services

Goals

  • Want to see varied services

  • Seek to work with companies who are on the cutting edge

Motivations

  • Seek consulting firms who stand out from the rest

  • Want to see tangible work that isn’t just a ‘take our word and awards for it'

Pain points

  • Some sites are either ‘too federal’ or ‘too commercial’

High Fidelity Design

Style Guide

Developer Assets

After feedback from our Product Owner, the Software Development service area lead, we were able to hand off final PDF's as well as images, CSS files, brand, and style guides. This closed the feedback loop for us as Designers. We were available for consultation but were also confident that they had what they needed to develop a full home page.

Next Steps

Build out each section into a full page, elaborating more on the content that Excella is producing, the awesome work they're doing, and the impact Excella is having on the community.