EVERFI

Website Redesign

Overview

EVERFI is a DC-based education startup we worked with last year on a brand refresh and creating a new website as a part of their $190 million IPO. As a startup rapidly acquiring new companies, they had a continuously growing group of stakeholders and an evolving project scope.

project structure

We structured our relationship with our primary point of contact as a close partnership—though we kept him out of the day-to-day status updates, we relied on him for organizational insights and helped him manage his group of stakeholders.

We organized internally around agile methodologies, bringing in developers early so we could ensure that our recommendations were technically feasible and to build prototypes to demo. We structured our biweekly sprint demos as both updates and workshops or working sessions. As such, a number of our traditionally larger deliverables were restructured around these meetings.

For this project, I:

• Led discovery efforts including analytics, competitor, stakeholder, and user research
• Led the content strategy
• Oversaw UX in the second half of the project
• Developed post types
• Managed a team of copywriters on over 800 hours of content development

work products

With a primary point of contact and a large stakeholder group, we structured our deliverables around our biweekly sprint demos and were careful to create deliverables that could go beyond our meetings. Below I have included examples of:

• Sitemap presentation
• User journeys

Sitemap Presentation

This presentation is one of the first we did as a part of the website redesign. We wanted to start building a clickable website prototype as quickly as possible—especially for sections of the site that needed less information architecture work. Building out post types, migrating content, and allowing the stakeholders to begin clicking around was really important for building momentum. As such, we determined that there were areas of the site we could go ahead and build and migrate content into while working in parallel to figure out the structure of some more difficult sections of the site. This presentation outlines those sections of the site and then kicks off the content workshop we held in the second half of the meeting.

One of the other ways we helped to develop stakeholder visual sitemap content was by going over the content envisioned for each section of the site. Below are two slides from presentations we gave our point of contact that also served as a tool for him to manage internal stakeholders.

User journeys

These slides are from one of the biweekly meetings and highlight a user journey across a section of the site. When we gave this presentation, it was animated in Keynote, allowing us to pause at each step in the user journey and discuss it with stakeholders.

The "Browser" user journey as it aligns to the Partnerships section of the sitemap:

The "Buyer" user journey as it aligns to the Partnerships section of the sitemap:

Conclusion

Today, EVERFI has a newly imagined WordPress site that both brings their award-winning brand to life and provides them with the tools and flexibility they need to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace.