Bluegrass website (internal project)

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Brief

Redesign the company website.

Challenges

The company's internal website had needed a revamp for several years so had fallen behind in terms of design patterns, information architecture and content strategy. This often happens with internal websites.

I needed to drive this on the side while doing my regular work. This is also not uncommon. To mitigate the risk of this project always being pushed back in favour of paying work we decided to assign a product owner to act as client.

I approached this in the same way I would any client project, with product discovery sessions, a review of data analytics and collaborative jobs to be done workshops with business and internal stakeholders.

There was no real idea of what made us special and I felt that we needed to unpack that to help us stand out from all the tech service providers out there.

This was followed by IA discussions, wireframing and eventually visual design.

Many competitor sites were being sent to me as references, often several new ones every week - so landing on a design concept took long. I decided to break out of the loop of looking at reference sites and doing some independent thinking about what I could do to make our website stand out.

I looked at our name, Bluegrass, and thought about the musical style that inspired the name. I wondered if there was some way we could celebrate that musical heritage. While looking through my design references I found my Blue Note jazz record sleeve design catalogue. That's when it hit me. Our case studies could be presented in the form of LP covers. And clients could browse our catalogue in the same way you browse analogue music, flipping through vinyls and pulling out any ones that catch your eye. The reference to Blue Note records would be a nod to our brand story and a homage to the designer Reid Miles.

Below are some self-narrated videos describing the design process.

Product discovery phase