STAGE 1: DEVELOP A PLAN

PROJECT DEFINITION

Since I have prior experience in designing pages, content, and architecture for a holding company (Energizer Holdings), I am already familiar with how the website should function and how to update the design aesthetic without losing brand essence.

In compiling my research, I combined analysis from scientific, academic, and non-scholarly sources (see bibliography), from books to journals to blogs, and measured those findings against one another and current methodologies and trends in both UX research and design. 

Holding company websites are tricky from a UX perspective because there are several distinct user groups who visit and interact with the site with varying purposes and frequencies. Those user groups include:

• Corporate job seekers

• Investors

• Current employees

• Members of the media

• Potential partners 

• Competitors 

Enterprise Holdings’ context of existence is fairly constrained and niche-oriented, as the user groups share one commonality: each visits the site seeking information rather than products or services.

Site Audit

The current Enterprise Holdings website (https://www.enterpriseholdings.com) requires a thorough audit in the interest of determining specific user-groups, usability issues, analytics data (especially conversion, bounce rates, and user location metrics/dimensions), sitemap errors, UX efficiency boosts via architectural restructuring, UI quality and cohesion, and other considerations. 

At first glance, the site landing page demands an updated UI. Some issues I encountered are pixelated graphics, poorly positioned search field, outmoded carousel, compositional and typographical problems, superfluous perennial content, and redundant navigation.The carousel utilizes generic stock photos. A drab and somewhat unintelligible color scheme and a lack of harmony among fonts further erode the user experience. In short, the landing page neither engages nor delights, and although a holdings company need not take major design risks, it is important for any corporation of this size to project user empathy and a clearly defined design aesthetic. These attributes, for an internationally recognized brand like Enterprise, are nothing if not conspicuous in their absence. 

One last thing. The landing page design would do well to prioritize its layout and design based on a user group hierarchy, which can only be ascertained through data that I unfortunately do not have access to, such as site analytics and internal user and traffic statistics. However, some of this data can be triangulated based on other factors, such as the sitemap, existing navigation, text-based content, and other observable factors. 

Research Questions: What experience is this landing page priming its visitors for? Is the page delivering on that expectation? If so, how? If not, why not? And what improvements can be made to ensure effective priming?

Stakeholder Interviews 

Unable to conduct stakeholder interviews due to lack of access.

Value Proposition

A front-facing corporate holdings site with various portals for specific user groups (job-seekers, current employees, etc.). The purpose of the site is to inform these different user groups rather than provide a product or service. As a result, the site is rightly utilitarian. However, utilitarian design can be rhetorically impactful and visually resonant without sacrificing economy or enlarging the digital footprint. 

Concept Sketches

I propose a landing page resembling something like what you see above.

Enterprise enjoys near-universal name recognition, meaning the design and marketing teams spend most of their energy maintaining and evolving brand power, rather than building it. However, a company like Enterprise, which owns multiple subsidiaries, the holdings site presents a unique challenge: it must carry a synergistic design language that speaks for the parent company and its subsidiaries. The current design language fails the task. 

View a simple usability test I created using Google Forms.

Competitive Research

Competitors’ holdings sites, including Hertz and Avis Budget, as well as that of Enterprise Holdings, are similarly underwhelming in terms of design language and user-experience.

Hertz

The Hertz site, for example, is simply a section of the primary company’s site (it’s not even a sub-site). It makes more sense to host a separate holdings site because the user groups often differ, and there’s really no reason to interrupt those user experiences with content and navigation that targets other user groups (such as the tabs for ‘Reservations’ and ‘Discounts & Coupons’, etc.). Users may be confused by the Login/Sign-Up button (header, top-right)—is it for customers, employees, investors, or someone else?

Avis Budget

Avis Budget hosts its holdings site separate from the main company sites. The hero image is an odd, confusing choice. Were it a carousel showcasing various centers of operation worldwide, the purpose of the images might be more immediately clear. But a single image of a city in Spain leaves users scratching their heads. Have they stumbled upon an overseas site by accident? Users are forced to read the caption text which, unfortunately, provides little additional context. Column widths in the body of the page (including the sidebar navigation) fail to create hierarchy. While the ’News’ column is the page’s main content, the eye is drawn to the stocks widget and brightly colored Annual Report graphic to the left. The page’s design flaws stem from a combination of neglect and priority. 

Both sites communicate a lack of empathy for users. What incentive do users have to interact with these sites, and how much time can users be expected to spend navigating these pages? 

Energizer Holdings

The Energizer Holdings landing page succeeds in more ways than it fails. First, it utilizes the company’s design language (including precise hex color codes and high-quality logomark), a simple, intuitive interface, an up-to-date carousel targeting multiple user-groups (the photos share tinting, contrast, and brightness properties!), refreshing use of negative space, and tidy navigation. 

The only serious design flaws are the redundant navigation (do we need the graphic nav below the fold?), a barren footer, and bland layout. The page is clearly built from a template. Below the fold, there’s a surprising lack of content. 

Quantitative Research

I assembled a small preliminary user testing group and administered to them the following tests:

• Quantitative Usability Testing (Benchmarking)

• Web Analytics 

• A/B Testing/Multivariate Testing

• Card Sorting

• Tree Testing

• Surveys or Questionnaires 

• Clustering Qualitative Comments

• Desirability Studies 

• Eyetracking Testing 

WIREFRAMES

For more wireframes, make a request either directly (via the Contacts page) or through a recruiter at Creative Circle or The Creative Group.

STAGE 3: DESIGN & VALIDATION

DESIGN & VALIDATION

For the design stage I decided to stick with a graphics-heavy interface that showcases color-rich images over which headings and callouts would be clearly legible and emphasized. A graphics-heavy interface has its drawbacks (scarcity of information, some users report experiencing a kind of “interface claustrophobia”), but there are also many advantages.

First, graphics-heavy interfaces are typically colorful and inviting, suggesting the business to be done on the site will be pleasurable and smooth (much the same reaction users claim to feel on travel and vacation websites, which often use a similar approach).

Second, the graphics—especially the full-width ones—serve as “windows” to interior pages. In other words, big, pleasant images tend to signal to the user that the interior pages will be simple and pleasurable to navigate. Another, more metaphorical benefit of the windows layout is users are granted a view into the company itself. The view granted to Enterprise Holdings’s users promises to be modern, expansive, and alive with glowing colors and luxurious elements.

Third, the simple, minimalistic interface suggests the site is presenting, as forthrightly and transparently as possible, all that it has to offer. No user wants to feel as though they need to do a “deep-dive” numerous levels down into the interior of the site. My design makes cross-site and cross-sectional navigation easy and omni-present through header and footer navs, as well as various windows scattered throughout the site that remind users who might not otherwise think to do so to visit other sections on the site.