Launch Poly + Design system
Role: Design Manager
Task: Launch a new digital experience for a new company, called Poly, a merging of two well-known brands into one. Create and build a Design strategy to support all digital experiences and channels through a new Design system and new CMS.
Summary
Plantronics acquired Polycom in 2017 and went through a massive rebrand as it merged two prominent brands into one, called, Poly, a leader in enterprise telecommunications.
With a new Brand a large effort was needed to support the launch of the company, the sunsetting of two large companies and the creation of all new materials, products, digital strategies and marketing plans. This involved multiple teams, multiple stakeholders, multiple executive sponsors, and sign offs to approve final designs. So many areas to delve into but getting the design principles and design strategy established from the beginning was critical in laying the groundwork for all the work that would be necessary to build out a new Brand, new site, using a new platform.
User research and testing
Our timeline allowed for extensive user research to be done to understand who our users were, what they needed and how they worked. Getting this work upfront gave us the understanding of our users needs and saved us time on the backend correcting mistakes. We met with various stakeholders and conducted card sorting, user testing, and surveys to better understand if the pathways users took were successful. By gaining these insights first, we were able to properly build user stories that mapped to what our customers and stakeholders needed and what they're trying to accomplish.
Our user stories helped us to align on exactly what needed to get done. This consisted of what our user needed to accomplish their main goals, while also including acceptance criteria to give us something to reference to reach the end goal. We analyzied survey data, collected metrics and documented a baseline that we could measure from, so that testing, iteration and optimization were easy to accomplish.
Wireframing, prototyping and testing
Once all the data and research had been collected, we created user stories for three journeys:
1. Purchase a product
2. Find a solution for business industry
3. Get support or find a partner
We built out several layouts that mapped to content blocks inside each wireframe, identifying the purpose and goal of each section. These initial concepts were shared with stakeholders and feedback collected. Once the revised versions were approved, we built them into usable prototypes to further test in a usability study and observe if users could easily perform the tasks that were identified as success in our user stories.
Once we established our top journeys and ideal solutions for each layout we could start to break these experiences down into building blocks that became reusable components for the new design system. The design system provided our designers and developers a library of our design patterns and building blocks to support the entire site and enabled fast and efficient production that allowed scalability and consistency.
Design system creation
Results were:
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Design system that documented design principles, animations, grids, UI components and page templates.
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Marketing style guide comprised of fonts, colors, visual language, logo/marketing guidelines. These are more akin to your traditional marketing style guide.
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Editorial Guidelines comprised of voice and tone, capitalization, punctuation rules.
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Brand new CMS platform