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As our company has evolved to serve different industries and professions, we discovered an opportunity to redesign our website to establish a stronger connection between Ascend and its portfolio of brands and present a fuller picture of our impact. We also sought to create a site that closely adhered to modern web design best practices including better responsive design and UX/UI elements, multimedia integration (video) and ADA compliance.
Additionally, we wanted to employ a design that would help make our brand more human-focused by incorporating more photos of our own team members and adopting a warmer, human-centered tone by bringing forward the voice of employees — from our individual contributors all the way up to our senior leaders — to tell the story of our meaningful work, our impact and our values-driven, people-first culture. Lastly, we wanted to generate excitement, interest and affinity for our brand and create an engaging platform to illustrate what makes Ascend a unique place to work and help attract top talent.
The project started by interviewing internal stakeholders to learn what our teams and our brands need from our website to achieve their goals. We then partnered with our UX team to conduct research on the then current site and user testing of multiple designs and navigation to gain insights on site navigability and content, and to identify opportunities to enhance the user experience. We then created a new site map that guided the design and content creation process throughout the project.
Previously, users had to select from a limited navigation menu that included About, Our Businesses, Culture, Careers, Contact and News. Each of these pages were populated with content that required users to continue scrolling far down the page to find information that would be "buried" versus incorporating sub-pages to find information more easily.
In the website refresh, we shifted to using four main navigation items — About, Our Brands, Careers and News & Blog — each of which include a drop-down menu with 3-5 sub-menus or "child" pages with topics and information related to the "parent" page. This new style of information architecture is designed to simplify site navigation and more clearly delineate topics without requiring users to engage in extra scrolling. We also enhanced the Search function to more thoroughly crawl the site to generate accurate results across pages as well as news and blog entries.
Our development team implemented the site redesign by leveraging the Scrum framework, providing the flexibility to seamlessly incorporate UX changes during the ongoing development process. The team designed a set of components, each tailored to a specific content type, empowering authors without HTML expertise to easily create and author pages using drag-and-drop capabilities.
After final designs were completed and content was populated, we demoed the site for final feedback, testing and refinements before launching in September 2023.
Initial site analytics show increases in multiple metrics: page views are up 99%, users are up 12% and sessions are up 10%. Our bounce rate also improved by 37%.
Nomination Title: Ascendlearning.com Navigation and Structure
