Background
Gatorade has been VML's top client since 2010. Our team has always strived to deliver great work and solid results for the company. In 2016, a small team was put together to redesign the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI). This institution's mission is to help athletes optimize their health and performance through research and education in hydration and nutrition science. In other words, their research provides insights about our beloved Gatorade beverages.
Gatorade, the Science behind the drink
Role
UX Design Lead
The team
Visual Designer, SEO specialist and Project Manager
The Challenge
Our goal was to help GSSI's website to evolve using a user-centered approach, while providing a bolder look and feel, close to Gatorade's brand style. Two things we had to keep in mind: First, our audience were academics, scientists, and coaches; This is a completely different target group of users than Gatorade has. And second, one of the major pain points for users was finding information they needed within the site.
Process
As the only Experience Designer on this team, I was responsible for:
A new information architecture for the site. To communicate the new concept to the team and our client, I created a representation of the sitemap. For labeling and url structure for the site, I worked together with our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team, which provided us clear insights and recommendations for page naming. After our client agreed with our solution, we moved forward to the website redesign.
Recommend ways to improve the user experience. Since the site contained a large group of articles and one of the major pain points for users was finding the information within the site, we didn't only focus on the article pages redesign, but also on the user journey, and the different ways users could access information, which required a reorganization of their categories.
Develop wireframes to represent our design concepts. Whiteboard sketches, rough wireframes helped to start the discussion within the team. Then, I would translate those to clean wires on Sketch and work with the visual design team to move to the next phase.
Result
A successful wayfinding experience from start to finish. A bolder and less cluttered design that offers the same number of articles and valuable information as before. The GSSI site promises a higher overall engagement rate.
Before
After