3M Automotive OEM and Tier
IA restructure
Overview
3M is a multinational Fortune 500 company producing products for the industries of consumer products, worker safety, energy, manufacturing and construction, and transportation. As the UX specialist aligned to the Automotive/Aerospace Division within the 3M Global Marketing Center, my role for this project consisted of collaborating with and leading teams of marketers, product teams, SEO, copywriters and designers to optimize and streamline the Automotive OEM and Tier market web experience.
The problem
The Automotive OEM and Tier web experience was circular, led to dead-ends, and overall consisted of a large library of redundant or misplaced pages of content. There was a lack of productivity, and no global base site that was easily replicable or consistent. In addition, there were errors in the catalog data categorization.
The goal
Correct catalog data and migrate rich content to the product category pages, creating a consistent and seamless experience. Create an up-to-date architecture that displays an optimized experience that is easy to navigate, keyword rich and serves up evergreen content to current and potential customers.
The process
Working with a copywriter and graphic designer to help identify, streamline, and optimize the web content, we collaborated to create a template design for all of the application pages. Through this project, a process template was developed that didn’t exist previously for the company marketing teams; which also helped with global replication.
Original IA
The experience prior to the restructure was messy. There were orphaned pages (red), old and non-working redirect links, and duplicate content. Some pages had minimal content that led users nowhere, or product focused content that belonged in the catalog (evergreen content in blue and purple; catalog pages green).
Proposed IA
Working with the division team to understand their business, I created a simplified IA that aligned with their marketing segments – making it helpful for users and manageable for the marketing team supporting the web content.
Customer journey
The identified customer journey was used to develop the content linking structure of the new IA. The journey can be thought of roughly as a funnel path-to-purchase; starting with evergreen content, leading users to the catalog of products, then eventually to product detail pages.
