Summary
The City of Boston’s Business Strategy Unit helps businesses relocate or expand within the city — a function that’s vital during the pandemic. But the Unit’s online presence did not represent the value they offer to businesses. So, working remotely, we overhauled their website, adding structure, visual elements and a call to action. The final design supports the Unit’s strategic priority of facilitating conversations with organizations that could grow in Boston.
Project specs
Scope of Work: High fidelity prototype for the redesigned website; supporting research
Client Contacts: Senior Advisor to the Chief of Economic Development and Project Manager
Team: Three UX designers working remotely during the pandemic
Timeline: Three week sprint
My Role: Led the Define phase and supported the Research and Design phases
Programs: Sketch, InVision, Otter, Miro, FlowMapp, Slack and Zoom
Starting by Listening
We began the three-week sprint by interviewing internal stakeholders. Asking about our client’s concerns, goals and priorities shaped the scope of the project. We spoke with the City of Boston’s:
Senior Advisor to the Chief of Economic Development
International Business Strategy Manager
Senior Content Editor & Strategist
Director of Project Management
Project Manager
“The information we have online doesn’t do a good job of communicating the breadth of our work.”
Problems with the Original Website
Based on our conversations with internal stakeholders and own evaluation of the existing website, we identified three core issues:
Lack of prioritization
Missing a call to action
Text-heavy design
Auditing the Content and Layout of the Original Site:
Identifying Stakeholder Groups
We accounted for diverse groups who come in contact with the website by categorizing their unique needs and challenges:
Business Strategy Unit
City of Boston DO-IT
C-Suite Decision-Makers
Businesses in Boston
International Businesses
Employees Being Relocated
Getting to Know Our Users
To understand our stakeholders, we contacted businesses that have relocated their organizations, surveyed and interviewed interviewed people who have moved to a new city for their career and collected quotes from press releases issued by businesses announcing their move to Boston.
This research provided 122 individual insights about stakeholders’ needs and challenges.
Section of the affinity map we used to organize the 122 insights
What Do Our Users Care About Most?
We used an affinity map to group the original 122 insights into 14 key themes. We found that the themes generally fit into two main buckets, business and lifestyle:
Business Themes
The reputation of the neighborhood or area matters to me.
I want to innovate cutting edge technology.
I want access to higher education and the resources of prestigious universities.
I want to collaborate with the brightest people and best talent.
I want to grow my company’s brand to be known as an industry-leader.
I want to do high quality work.
Lifestyle Themes
When considering moving to a new city, I’m looking to make a big change that shifts my perspective. It’s a move for the long-term.
I want to explore job opportunities and grow my career.
When trying to find out about the city, I trust what my network says about it.
I need to live within my means, while still doing the things I like.
I want to have stability and my necessities taken care of.
I value convenience and having a low impact — it needs to be easy for me to get around without a car.
I seek out new experiences. I want to live in a culturally diverse and inclusive place.
I want to live a healthy lifestyle. Access to outdoor recreation and good healthcare matters to me.
Bringing Our Insights to Life
We developed three personas, each with their own detailed list of behaviors, challenges and goals, to embody the synthesis of our research. These representations served as useful reminders throughout the rest of the design process to ensure our designs matched our users’ best interests.
Matt, a Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at a mid-sized robotics company based in Columbus, Ohio.
Values: Keeping his company at the forefront of innovative technology.
Frustrations: The company keeps losing opportunities to companies better-positioned to compete in international markets.
Goals: Win back market share from international competitors.
Isabella, a Human Resources Manager at the same robotics company as Matt, is responsible for hiring.
Values: Making the company stand out among its peers as a “best place to work.”
Frustrations: Attracting and retaining the best talent is increasingly challenging when going against the hot tech scenes on the coasts.
Goals: Find the best talent available, attract them to the company and keep them committed to it’s mission.
Jon, the owner of a small, family-run restaurant that has been part of the Boston community for three generations.
Values: Continuing the family tradition of the restaurant without losing its personal touch.
Frustrations: Rents are rising and it’s hard to get bank loans or find investors willing to buy into his business.
Goals: To lease commercial space in a lower-rent neighborhood that still has high foot traffic and access to public transportation.
Learning from the Competition
Boston is in a competitive battle for talent with several major metropolitan areas. We reviewed the analogous websites from the following cities across the country to collect best practices. In particular, we assessed the sites’ keywords, organizational structure, and calls to action.
Synthesizing Our Research
To bridge from our research to the design of the website, we drilled into our research to uncover the reasoning for the site’s organization, structure and functionality. We developed a snapshot of our research findings through a SWOT analysis:
Strengths
Access to a trove of existing content and stats
Fully developed style guide
Existing components from the DO-IT team
Provides individualized support to organizations
Opportunities
Make the webpage visually compelling (dynamic)
Highlight key aspects of the “why Boston” pitch
Integrate a clear call to action for individuals and businesses
Build out the info on retaining businesses already in Boston
Weaknesses
Low traffic and limited user engagement
Missing a meaningful “call to action”
Text heavy and few visuals
Long user cycle
Threats
Low SEO index
Users do not understand the full scope of what Boston offers
Users might bounce off the page to other Economic Development subpages
Organizing the New Website
Making a site map allowed us to visualize all branches of content on the site and understand their relative priority.
The new site map contains all the existing content but shifts the hierarchy towards the new elements
Mapping Users’ Pathways
We also developed two user flows from the perspective of our personas. Matt and Marco would be most interested in learning about aspects of Boston’s economy, before requesting a meeting with the Business Strategy Unit (the desired outcome).
The “business” user flow shows how users would learn about opportunities to grow their organization
The lifestyle user flow, created with Isabella’s needs in mind, follows a similar track but covers what it’s like to live in Boston before leading to requesting a meeting with the Business Strategy Unit.
The “lifestyle” user flow follows a similar structure but focuses on what it’s like to live in the city
Proposing a Solution
We encompassed our work from the Define phase in the following solution statement. Importantly, these quantitative metrics can be tracked by the Unit over time, to see if the changes resulted in the desired outcome.
We believe that by
1) adding eight tabs to the webpage with key Boston business and lifestyle stats, visuals and information; and
2) a general “Contact Us” form
we will increase the amount of time users spend on the site and the number of conversations that they start with the Business Strategy Unit.
Iterating Rapidly to Find What Works
We began illustrating our ideas through a design studio to get our ideas down on paper quickly to communicate them to the group. This way, we can see which designs are worth pursuing before spending too much time going down one path.
The first section eventually included four images instead of one and moved the global navigation above, instead of on the side
Idea for an interactive map of Boston was scaled back due to technical constraints
Contact section initially had a form field, which we replaced with checkmark boxes
This carousel ended up being separated into two sections, organized by theme
Crafting the Pitch for Boston
To convey to businesses why they should consider moving to Boston, we sifted through hundreds of pages of documents to pull out the relevant stats and information that would matter to our users. The City of Boston’s 218-page proposal to locate Amazon’s second headquarters in Boston was particularly valuable.
218-page PDF containing many of the stats we used in the pitch for Boston
Introducing the Business Strategy Unit
With our sketches and draft copy in hand, we began wireframing the prototype. In this title screen, we used a hero image to make the site more visually compelling and give a sense of the Unit’s personalized approach.
Showcasing the Unit’s Services
To make it clearer what the Business Strategy Unit offers to users, we condensed the existing site’s top-line description and “About Us” page into a single section. We also simplified the the new “What We Do” section by summarizing the Unit’s services into four pillars, each with an image.
Making the Pitch for Boston
We initially considered using a rotating carousel of images that showcased key stats about the city’s economy and quality of life. Due to the technical constraints, however, we opted to convey the same information using static tabs that the user can click to change. This second approach accomplishes the same goal while using elements that are more easily implemented by the development team.
Facilitating a Connection
We designed a contact form that allows users to check off their areas of interest and provide baseline information about themselves. This removes a barrier for users (i.e., drafting an email) and gives more context to the Business Strategy Unit about who is reaching out.
Testing Our Solution
We conducted seven interviews with internal stakeholders to gather their feedback on the proposed design. Asking them each to complete three tasks showed us what was was unclear or missing in our design. Just as important was qualitative feedback, which both confirmed our hypothesis and offered areas for improvement, such as adding information to the “What We Do” section and specificity in the global navigation.
Find the number of business districts
This test required users to navigate through the Business tabs. Most users found the answer without hesitation.
Find Boston’s income tax rate
While the answer to this this question was located in the Lifestyle tabs, most users went through the Business tabs first. We addressed this by adding text above the tabs clarifying the content in each section.
Request a meeting
We considered this to be the most important test because starting a conversation is one of the key goals of the site. Users found the form simple to fill out, though it raised the question whether they should be able to request a meeting without selecting an area of interest.
Proposed Next Steps
With more time, we would conduct another round of interviews with internal stakeholders to ensure the content we drafted and stats we selected for the pitch match the Unit’s strategic priorities. We would also conduct another round of usability tests, this time with external stakeholders (i.e., business owners or hiring managers) to ensure the site is easy to use and understand.
Reflections
Learning to adapt to constraints: Finding a solution that fit within the organization’s technical constraints was essential to the success of a project. We worked with the development team, rather than rigidly following our original vision.
Gaining experience in project management: There were many moving pieces throughout the three week sprint, which required careful organization. Along the way, we kept the client up-to-date on the project through weekly Zoom meetings and corresponded over Slack to share time-sensitive updates.
Ending with gratitude: Everyone we interacted with from the city of Boston team was enthusiastic, positive and constructive. We could not have done it without their participation and support.