Rebranding Northrop Grumman
Improve brand perception and user experience through user research and user-centered redesign
Project Summary
Northrop Grumman needed to conduct a website redesign project to create a public facing platform that could logically re-organize and represent a wide breadth of informational content both legacy and new, including capabilities, sector structure, articles, news, etc.
Also, to this it was important to come up with a modern and appealing visual style that will shine a light on the brand personality.
Responsibilities
Project Team
Mission Statement
Make it easy to understand the company value and facilitate positive user experience through informative and relevant content to navigate potential clients in the right direction.
The Challenge
Since their last redesign in 2005, Northrop Grumman’s online presence had bloated to 1000+ pages, written, created and designed for a brand that didn’t reflect who they were anymore and wasn’t leveraging latest web technologies to serve users with emerging content consumption devices.
This complicated brochureware site was no longer an easy place to find information about the company.
Not only was it difficult to navigate through their large amount of content and complex structure, but when users found what they were looking for, long pages full of industry language made it difficult to understand exactly what they are looking at.
As a result, user acclimation rates were suffering, ultimately hurting the company’s corporate image. In this case, the best choice was to dedicate an entire UX team to put themselves into user’s journey and rethink the website impartially. That helped to focus on pain points and user experience, without the temptation to clog the site with unnecessary details and complex information architecture.
This project was big and its problems were comprehensive. So, the NG UX team focused on streamlining and simplifying with a new, rebranded website that used user-centered design methodology to remediate public perception and user experience.
The Process
Involve users early and often. Lean from them and iterate.
1
UX review
The best way to start cooking anything new is by taking a look at your ingredients with a UX review. Poor URL mapping, an ineffective site map and duplicate content were hurting user experience. The UX review gave us a clearer picture of the what we needed to create and design.
2
Gathering and analyzing quantitative data
We then moved on to gathering data analytics because once you know the whats, how many an who’s then becomes easier to know-hows and why behind it. This was achieved mainly based on google analytics gathered throughout the years.
From understanding the user intentions and the way they interacted with the website we got an array of questions that can be asked in contextual inquiries and user interviews. We then recognized the main audience type and segregated them into categories.
3
User research
Now we knew what are audience is searching for and more interested in then moved towards finding the whys and hows behind them. This user research was mainly based on contextual interviews with stakeholders and end-users, also usability tests were conducted with existing and new visitors. The method helped us to identify the user journey, from where they found the website to how they got to what they were looking for to how long they stayed on the site. It also allowed us to understand the visitors’ needs and pain points.
4
Identify opportunities & Ideate
By recognizing Northrop Grumman’s needs that matched the same domain as the visitors’ pain points, we moved towards the experience mapping to paint the user journey.
5
Prototyp & validate
Everything up until this point is an educated and informed assumption. This assumption needs to be validated. We turned those assumptions into wireframes and prototypes and performed usability testing with the users and iterated upon them.
6
Build
Once the prototypes have been validated, the results, including hi fidelity wireframes, UI guidelines, acceptance criteria, etc. are handed off to the build team of UI developers, Sharepoint experts, C++ developers, etc. The final website is then deployed to required environments.
Results
After the launch of the redesigned northropgrumman.com website, visitors get an optimized brochureware experience that matches Northrop Grumman’s new brand both contextually and visually. They get anywhere on the site in under 3 clicks with added opportunities to take action or convert, no matter where they are.
Northrop Grumman is also better providing its customers content by easily updating their own content in Microsoft Sharepoint as changes or additions to content occur.