Overview:
Sales enablement content from 12 WordPress sites—each managed by a separate business unit (BU)—was being migrated to a new content management system (CMS).
This was our opportunity to create a common metadata schema for this content that would support sales staff (“sellers”) in search, filtering, and discovery.
Challenges:
BU stakeholders did not want to give up control of their own sites, which they believed to be supporting seller needs just fine.
Metadata modeling capabilities in the new CMS were limited. Content could be labeled (i.e. classified, tagged, categorized) with terms from controlled lists of values, but hierarchical lists were not supported. Most of the enterprise taxonomies in use elsewhere in the org were hierarchical.
Approaches:
User research:
After a quick review of the existing sites, we suspected that sellers struggled to find content across the 12 WordPress sites, despite the BU stakeholders’ assumptions. But in order to know one way or the other, we had to do some research.
- We did contextual interviews with 16 sellers to understand their current workflows, pain points, and information needs. (I led this study, from start to finish).
- We also surveyed a large number of sellers to understand how widespread the pain points identified in the interviews were. (I developed the survey questions, and worked with a stakeholder to recruit participants.)
- I analyzed a sample of search log queries from the existing sites to understand the types of things sellers were looking for.
- I created two seller personas based on the insights from the research.
Metadata modeling:
The new system supported faceted (filtered) search, and we needed to determine which content attributes to use as filters and how to implement them considering the system’s technical constraints.
- I defined attributes for search filters that supported the user information needs identified in the research.
- We developed workarounds for implementation. (The workarounds and implementation were a team effort.)
Highlights:
The user research findings, presentation, and personas were eye-opening for stakeholders, and one director later reported that he continued to share and refer back to the presentation and findings long after the project was completed.
Outcomes:
- The 12 WordPress sites were eventually deprecated. Sellers are now able to search one repository for all sales enablement content.
- Search and filtering functionality was greatly improved.
- Governance and workflows related to sales enablement content are more centralized and consistent.
Artifacts:
Personas
I created two personas based on insights from the seller research. The personas highlighted seller goals, pain points, and specific metadata requirements for content to improve findability.
Research Findings Report / Presentation
A few slides from the presentation:
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