When I first joined EdgeQ, I was asked to adjust the brand identity to feel more futuristic and cutting-edge. The founder also wanted a thin and open font for their slide decks.
The executive team at EdgeQ felt the website was outdated and asked me to make it "unique." I organized meetings across different departments to gain a holistic understanding of the product and their vision for this redesign.
Executive: CEO + Founder
Marketing: Head of Marketing
Technical: VP of Product Management
I took notes on wants, needs, and conducted competitor analyses based on sites mentioned by the stakeholders.
After speaking with the executive team, I identified the target users into four major groups: investors, customers, job applicants, and journalists/analysts--with the first two being a priority. I created user personas to better understand EdgeQ's different relationships and to keep this audience in mind during the design process.
The content also had room for improvement. Both the semiconductor and the communications industries are very complex. The original text and graphics made it difficult to tell what the product entailed. Non-engineers like journalists or investors would likely find it more confusing.
I rebuilt the information architecture with a hierarchy-style diagram I adopted to suit EdgeQ’s website needs. I worked across teams to rewrite the content to be more coherent and embody EdgeQ’s branding. My objective was to reorganize the content to feel more logical and intuitive.
I created a content inventory spreadsheet to help define the new layout and content. I added all existing current content on the website and labeled what to keep, remove, update, and rewrite. This website didn’t have many pages/links, but I wanted everything users encounter to feel natural. Through this process, I realized that:
1. The written content is unfriendly towards users that aren’t engineers or in the telecom industry. There is a lot of jargon from the get go.
2. The technical content is paired with confusing imagery that lack context.
3. The pages that require the most changes are the Home page and Technology page.
4. Overall, the writing needs clarity.
The landing page and product pages went through the most iterations, and were the most crucial to stakeholders. Stakeholder wants oriented strongly around attention-grabbing visuals, so I focused on developing brand image assets and establishing a b-roll collection.
For the landing page, we wanted a video relevant to people (as opposed to vector graphics, or a chip photo, for example). We chose a tablet in a smart agriculture context. The tagline needed to address the bigger picture of connectivity. The header text changed often, but I decided on "A wireless world..."
For the product page, we had originally designed for an explosion animation of a small cell revealing EdgeQ’s product inside, but this eventually shifted towards designing an abstract chip graphic instead.
Many of the image assets were developed with 3D designers since we did not have existing product imagery at hand. There has been some iterations since the launch (new pages, content, etc.), but these are the latest visuals. Stakeholder wanted the content to flow in movement-wise, which I worked with the developers on to create the desired effect.
