Research Objectives

Our client, a large irrigation manufacturer, approached us stating they feel like their site has gotten a bit behind the times and that they'd like a responsive mobile-friendly site that would hopefully make the site better for all their users. Our initial discovery phase opened up several questions -

• What's actually broken beyond "not mobile-friendly" — and look underneath the ask, what is responsiveness actually trying to fix?

• Who are we designing for, across executives, growers/farmers, and dealers, in an industry we don't have prior context in?

• How does the client's brand voice and value proposition need to shift to impact how customers actually perceive them?

Approach

Discovery & Audit: I worked with the UX designer to inventory the site's existing pages and product content via a UX audit, while both designers conducted a competitive design audit.

Interviews: I led 12 stakeholder and user interviews across three groups — company executives, growers/farmers, and dealers roughly split "4 per group" — to understand needs across a sales model with multiple intermediaries.

I synthesized these findings into a Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to represent needs across these groups, helping us collapse some of the functions and questions based on needs and not titles or personas.

Field Visit: We visited their HQ / Factory and saw some of the sites their key stakeholders and users were in

*Scope constraint: I designed card sorts and surveys for internal teams and customers, but time constraints limited fielding to internal teams only. As our findings needed to be expedited and so our survey [n = 60] was still able to give us directional insight.

Analytics: I also simultaneously ran web analytics reviews. The data we had available was limited to surface behavior patterns, popular pages, and search queries pre-redesign, but was still able to give us good insight into challenges users were running into.

Key Findings

• Finding: The product catalog was too large and unstructured for users to navigate → We restructured navigation and information hierarchy to reduce overload, prioritizing clear categorization over exhaustive listing
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• Finding: Photography assets were high-quality but weren't integrated into the page in a way that reinforced brand impression → We rebuilt the visual system around existing photography rather than commissioning new assets, but focused on how images were framed and placed for someone looking to learn or purchase.
  
  

• Finding: Even power users defaulted to site search, which had many usability issues. → Alongside the information hierarchy redesign, we also updated site search allowing for flexibility and clarity (tags, sorting, and redirection)
  
  

• Finding: This was a company of genuine innovation in their space, but nothing about the site or content communicated that. As some stakeholders put it plainly: "People think of us for high-quality products and high-quality people, but not necessarily as a thought leader." → This directly shaped the brand voice and content strategy — since we realized positioning the client as an expert, not just a manufacturer would have the most significant impact in convincing customers to stick with this brand.

Competitor Design Audit

User Flow Analytics

V1 Jobs To be Done

Impact:

• 87% increase in organic search traffic post-launch

• 40% increase in monthly pageviews

• 24% reduction in bounce rate

• Solved usability issues the client hadn't identified themselves — reframing the engagement from a visual refresh to a functional and brand intervention

• Repositioned brand content strategy around expertise and relationship, not just product specs
  
  

What I'd Do Differently

I'd push earlier to protect time for the customer-facing card sort and survey — internal-only data was directionally useful, but real customer input on navigation categories would have de-risked some of our information architecture decisions before launch rather than validating them after.

This project also came with constraints, the info ecosystem being a client's data meant we didn't always have access to it and especially couldn't keep sticky on future improvements.