UX Design Case Study – Atlas Bridge

My Role: UX Designer

Industry: Construction

The Goal:

The client, Atlas Bridge, wanted to create a desktop and mobile-responsive experience that they could leverage as part of a digital marketing push to acquire new business.

The Process:

With a static and hard to update website in place, the first order of business was finding a web content management system that Atlas could use. WordPress was the obvious first choice, because of its ease of use, strength where search engine optimization and flexibility of features via third-party plugins.

Atlas are proud of what they do and with a hundred years of bridge building behind them they wanted the website design to be contemporary, easy-to-use, but also graphically rich featuring images of their work through the years. As a team, we had a lot of fun with this because there were so many great and original images available to use. Additionally, the Atlas site needed to be mobile-responsive and make a strong graphical showing on handheld devices, as a new breed of mobile and tech savvy construction industry professionals were the focus of their new site and digital marketing push to acquire new business.

We did a series of user interviews
with internal stakeholders,
current clients and potential customers

Because Atlas, and the digital marketing agency that they had contracted with had a good sense of the target audience, user research was limited. We did a series of user interviews with internal stakeholders, current clients and some folks who were identified as potential customers. This feedback and their website analytics gave us the foundation we needed to begin to prototype.

The usage focus would be a mixed bag of iOS and Android users in the majority with a good number of users still preferring a desktop experience a 60/40, mobile:desktop split. From a design perspective, the primary ask was that the homepage be a long-scroll, single page design.

Once we picked a series of photos that we intended to use on the site and the digital marketing agency green-lighted the selections, as they’d be using them in their campaigns. We started mocking up navigation, information architecture and the overall structure of the site.

With a handful of paper prototypes that we output from Photoshop, we walked the stakeholders through the experience that we had assembled, made some small adjustments and generally moved forward with our initial layout and design.

They wanted the homepage to be
a long-scroll,
single page design

The creation of the high-fidelity design came down to bringing the images, styles, information architecture and other graphical elements to life in a WordPress theme. The team was able to work quickly since consensus had been built with the prototypes, image selection, etc. and once content had been delivered, we just plugged that in and handed over the design to the agency to search engine optimize.

This was a fun team to be on because the work was straight-forward, well-defined and the early definition and prototyping allowed us to get in front of any significant design constraints.

The Win:

With the digital marketing campaign, the SEO content work that followed and the ease at which new business prospects could contact Atlas, they realized a 15% increase in new business in the first year after the digital marketing campaign kicked off.

The updated design helped them realize
a 15% increase in new business

 I have omitted and obfuscated confidential and proprietary information in this case study.