Cognizant.com
Organisation | Cognizant Interactive
Client | Cognizant Technology Solutions
My Role | UX Strategy, Creative Direction, Stakeholder Management
How can the corporate website of a global tech company provide an experience as future-proof as its service offerings?
Preface.
Cognizant is a global technology services leader, dedicated to helping the world’s most established businesses remain the most valuable brands by advancing every aspect of how they serve their customers: digitising their products, services and customer experiences; automating their business processes; and modernising their technology infrastructures.
With a corporation as large and diverse as Cognizant, with offices across 35 countries, the corporate website serves as the foundation for the 65+ corporate country sites that utilize similar architecture, design and technology i.e., the lynchpin for the organisation’s entire online ecosystem. This site caters to a wide range of stakeholders (investors, journalists, customers, employees & potential recruits) across industries (including banking and financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail), and features an extensive amount of product and service information and historical content.
However, the website at the time was outdated, cluttered, and difficult to navigate, merely displaying all the information and acting as a digital option that got the job done instead of aligning with the company's exciting growth and pace of innovation. It was also not optimized for mobile devices, and did not align with modern design trends, all of which contributed to a leading bounce rate and confusing user experience.
Cognizant Interactive, the in-house digital experience agency, was tasked with an end-to-end redesign and overhaul of the website, which needed to serve as a business-to-business portal for customers, as well as an internal platform for employees and new recruits. With this project, we had a really great opportunity to showcase the backbone of the company—the stakeholders. And by focusing on the stories of the stakeholders — the technology, the processes, the people — the site would effectively extend the brand story, that Cognizant is working to re-engineer the way businesses run.
This is the story of how my team and I applied focused research, collaboration and unwavering customer focus of lean UX, lightweight design and constant learning loops to deliver bottom-line results on a tight schedule.
Intentional user journeys.
Exploratory storytelling.
The first challenge was to diagnose structural issues inherent in the current site and restructure both the information architecture and the visual design to enhance the user journey. To help create a more integrated experience and present a unified brand, we streamlined the UX into intentional user journeys based on specific user goals.
As the lead UX/Content Strategist on this project, I began with a thorough audit of the existing website's information architecture, content, and user flow, spanning all of Cognizant’s existing product and service offerings and dozens of other digital documents.
This user-centric groundwork enabled the team to distil and re-organize the content in a logical and engaging way. Since this project would literally change the digital face of Cognizant, we also interviewed the executive leadership and product, marketing, sales, customer support teams and stakeholders from across the organization as a basis for determining how the new site could deliver dynamic content to specific user segments.
The UX team carried out a comprehensive website review by interacting with the site as a typical user (as a customer or client) would. This was followed by a close reading of Google Analytics data to reveal meaningful patterns around specific sections and pages.
As I waded through this process, several structural problems and user pain points came to the fore. For instance, the header menu and sidebar menus were confusing and not easily expandable, adding more friction to both the user experience as well as future site management. This way, I mapped out key user journeys across the website, outlining the different paths users would navigate. By developing a rigorous user interview process and tying questions to outcomes early on the process, we had already gathered highly focused feedback.
This background work along with the user journey mapping led to the development of a new site map and a comprehensive set of wireframes which became the basis for our design and development work. Armed with all this research, the design team created lo-fi prototypes and added fidelity as needed to present to stakeholders for feedback. These multivariate reviews helped qualify or disqualify specific design elements, which would then influence the entire team’s strategic decisions as they moved from incremental changes to complete redesign.
Living design.
The design team created a modern aesthetic with bold colours, HD imagery, and an atypical grid structure. The grid-based and modular structure was inspired by the need for the new homepage to represent a ‘living design’, making it easier to change content, move sections or build new pages inspired by stakeholder and user suggestions. These content blocks could be updated in the backend without the help of a developer, giving them true flexibility via an advanced content management system.
Content as design.
Our redesign strategy was more in line with what the users were looking for, rather than how the company was structured, and we removed outdated content in favour of rich content.
With interactivity, video, audio and exploratory storytelling, we gave a distinctive public face to the company, a newsworthy angle to its innovation and brought the voice of its employees to the audience. This way, the website was rebuilt from the ground up, focusing on all stakeholders, and making Cognizant.com more bespoke and user-friendly.
Thinking like a UX Researcher.
As the UX Strategist, I managed this project with a mobile-first approach, ensuring that the site was optimized for mobile devices, making it an accessible and convenient platform for all users.
Our developers also coded the front-end and back-end for the website, along with the desktop and mobile versions, testing with users throughout, from paper prototypes to working with wireframes and on to visual design.
In addition to this, we carried out a full SEO migration, making sure that the authority, ranking positions, and organic traffic that Cognizant had built up over the years were carried over to the new site.
The redesign is bold, expressive and dynamic with a modern functionality and discerning UX.
A core colour palette of navy, teal, cyan and blue and balance dynamism and prestige. Pages with dark backgrounds and larger images express who Cognizant is, while the content-rich pages are intentionally lighter to ease in the digestion of more complex content. We built working prototypes of a completely redesigned user experience, from simplification of the architecture, content design, to a UI that adapts, changes and responds to the user.
Both design and code utilize comprehensive systems that enable an optimal user experience in the present but allow for growth and scale of the site over time. This development strategy helped us streamline production and allowed for accessibility and compliance testing along the way.
A new digital home
for Cognizant.
We created a new digital home for Cognizant that was robust, intuitive and innovative, ultimately providing an experience as premium as its service offerings. The new site was designed with a focus on intuitive navigation (prioritising access to information) and a streamlined information architecture (organised into clear categories based on the type of content, such as industries, services, insights, and careers) that made it easy for visitors to find what they were looking for. This was a rare corporate site that managed to showcase its service offerings and emphasize its global reach while making the content easily accessible to a wide array of stakeholders, ranging from a potential customer researching a service offering to an investor seeking shareholder information.
As part of my project management responsibilities, I also worked with the design team to prepare a set of brand guidelines that set the tone and style for visuals and content based on an evolution of Cognizant’s core identity.
These visual and messaging guidelines – for all channels – were developed as an easy handover device for the variety of teams at Cognizant Interactive responsible for extending the new design language into other internal initiatives, corporate communications and a wide range of regional marketing and collateral, thus unifying a coherent brand system across cross-functional teams.
Going Live.
As the redesign was rolled out, the team cross-referenced live site data in Google Analytics and HubSpot, paying close attention to key metrics (conversion rate, submission rate, drop-off rate, goal completion, bounce rate, etc.), ran more heat mapping tests (1,000 users in multiple sessions) and usability tests (via user session recordings) while continuing to optimise the site in terms of UX and responsiveness. We also tested the site across devices and resolutions in multiple versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, Opera, and Yandex. And because the resulting website is as collaborative and flexible as the process itself, iterations could be made easily and often, keeping the design fresh and responsive to both user needs and business goals.
The new website was launched in stages, starting with a soft launch in U.S. and Canada, followed by a full public rollout in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The following post-launch business results were identified: increased engagement in critical CTAs; increased engagement with navigational elements; less reported stress among the product team.
Impact.
In terms of key impact metrics, the new site saw a 30% increase in traffic in the first 3 months after launch, with visitors spending 37% more time on the site than before. Additionally, the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page) was reduced by 20%.
Mobile traffic on the site also increased by 25%, with users reporting higher satisfaction rates and stronger likelihood to recommend the site to others.
Human insight.
Superhuman speed.
‘Intuition engineered’ codifies Cognizant as a future-facing company and a leader in delivering human insight at superhuman speed. Cognizant continues to be on the leading edge of harnessing the on-going technology revolution with its deep understanding of customers and enterprises to create new growth frontiers and opportunities.