Brian Tucker

There were several stakeholders, all with different objectives: editorial wanted to highlight journalism, sales wanted to highlight advertising, and talent acquisition wanted to highlight careers.

That’s a lot of goals! Through stakeholder interviews and subsequent brainstorms with company leadership, I was able to highlight each objective in a meaningful way.

Next I took stakeholders through the brainstorming process through wireframes and moodboards.

With stakeholders aligned, it was on to high fidelity mockups, I led the design team through exploration and ideation for styles and components based off the moodboard and wireframes.

Once those were settled, I componentized the designs and made base pages that would serve as the structure for the rest of the site.

I handed off the base pages to the junior designers who used them to build out mockups for the rest of the site while I began production.

I created the website using Webflow and the Client-First framework, starting with the base pages mockups I had created previously. This allowed me to begin developing the site while the other pages were still being created by the junior designers.

The website was going to be managed by non-designer internal users, so extra care was given to CMS implementation.

The culmination of the work left us with a site that achieved the stakeholder’s goals: a website that tells their story in a way that engages all of their audiences: readers, advertisers, and potential employees.

Prior to this project, the design team was not very involved in the sales process. To ensure any changes made were not disruptive to the sales process, significant time was spent working to understand their needs.

The lengthy discovery phase involved interviews with people across all levels of the department,  documenting of existing processes, and experimenting with all available tools.

The vision was simple: create an easy-to-use presentation template for sales proposals that will make them look good when pitching to clients and allow the sales team to spend less time thinking about design.

Execution was a little less simple! The first challenge was content: statistics had to be gathered and charted for over 20 different publications. Sales strategies had to be visualized. Product examples had to be sourced.

The real challenge was the second part: how do you make this user friendly while staying on brand? A large portion of this project was spent working with sales reps with no design experience to learn how they worked. This informed our designs and revisions as we worked to ensure we locked down as many elements as possible.

Once the deck was done, we needed to onboard the sales team to using it. I hosted in person and virtual trainings on the deck, going over design best practices and sales strategy.

As Industry Dive became a remote-first company, I created on-demand training courses to help reps do anything from the basics to visualizing their own concepts.

The result was an easy-to-navigate template with over 100 pre-designed slides. The sales team are able to quickly create decks that serve the needs of their clients, all while staying on brand.

The deck continues to be expanded and iteratively improved. Since its release, Industry Dive has seen significant increase in sales and revenue.