Strategy/UX/Design

Digitally Transforming a Brand.

Myself and the team had a long-term relationship with the Red Bull brand, creating numerous branded property sites while providing strategy and market insight. Based on our experience, it was the natural choice to have us re-define and re-design their global dot com portal.

Their current site focused primarily on the Red Bull Energy Drink product and relied on the numerous individual event sites to promote the brand and Red Bull lifestyle. This caused fragmented messaging in many cases, didn’t allow for proper channeling of the tremendous amount of compelling digital content Red Bull Media House was creating and most importantly – did not have the ability to gather and analyze data, integrate social media or provide rich mobile experiences on an enterprise level.

The Challenge

  • Migrate 50+ individual brand properties under one dot com
  • Develop a modular environment which needed to be  flexible with the ability to seamlessly evolve and grow
  • Develop a client facing site for editors and property owners to create individual “microsites” within the portal
  • Incorporate RB Media Houses’ massive amount of digital content
  • Provide the ability to localize content in up to 23 languages
  • Integration of social media channels
  • Allow rich experiences across multiple platforms

The Process

In-depth interviews with RB Product owners and editors to understand their needs as to re-shaping the way content would be delivered to users. We found that many editors had little technical experience, yet needed the ability to easily customize content on the fly (adding additional pages, incorporating live feeds, etc) based on the demanding needs of their consumers.

Creating initial sketches and site journeys to visualize the flow of content – from the way editors interact with the client-facing cms site through multiple options as to how the content is consumed by the end user.

Persona development and understanding how the user interacts with content based on their likes, dislikes and end goals. Given the cultural diversity of existing and potential users we categorized them into 3 main groups: Avid, Casual and Curious/Exploratory fans. From there we subcategorized users into sports fans, culture/music fans and gamers. Each consumed data in uniquely different ways which we needed to account for while creating the experience.

After many iterations of journey mapping both client-facing and consumer sites we began shaping the experience via lo-def wireframing and prototypes. User-testing the flow with RB’s editors was paramount in amending pain points and blocks during the content editing/delivery process. We also worked with end-user test groups in relation to how they search and/or browse content, what they wanted to see more of, what was working or not working for them and exploring new touch points to gather additional user information.

-22%

Bounce Rate

+43%

Average Time Spent

+28%

Repeat Visits

The Build

Once we had a keen sense of direction based on the above findings we began to build out the portal for live consumption utilizing Agile workflow. Although the initial Phase 1 deployment would be lacking key features, the framework was built to accommodate future iterations.

Phase 2 consisted of implementing additional feature sets for both the client and consumer facing sites, as well as educating Red Bull editors on how to maximize the site’s capabilities. Below is a partial list of Phase 2 features:

  • Additional toolkits to give editors more freedom in creating custom layouts for their content
  • Provide granular localization settings which allowed editors to choose up to 23 languages to publish content in
  • A growing list of tools to gather end user data (robust polls, visual surveys)
  • Social media toolkits which included features such as Facebook app creation and deployment
  • Additional mobile device functionality which mirrored the desktop experience

Measure

The team worked with Red Bull to analyze and validate metrics and KPI’s using a variety of measuring tools including Google Analytics. Since Red Bull wasn’t selling a product or service online, conversion points were based on amount of content consumed (time spent on pages, content downloads, social interactions, etc.) as well as live on the ground and online event attendance. It was difficult to accurately measure several KPI’s given the fact that the prior version of RedBull.com wasn’t a true content portal. We instead leveraged data from various larger RB event microsites which served as the brand’s voice prior to the launch.