Designing the
Norton Learning Site

Stakeholders from the College Marketing department at W. W. Norton & Company approached me with a unique problem: They noticed that there was a gap in purchases from some first time visitors of the site. They concluded that the company would love to push their brand forward in order to create better familiarity with new customers. Thus, the plan of the content marketing site was born: a site that would tell Norton’s story, without directly selling their products to the consumer. 

I took on the role of lead UX designer for this project. I met with stakeholders to understand their specific needs for the site and designed the site with elements that would make browsing, searching, and viewing content easy for the prospective consumer (teachers and students). After designing the product, I managed the product end-to-end for a year and a half after I designed the site; I also created design systems that would keep the site consistent no matter who updates it. The content marketing site generates $20,000 - $30,000 per year in revenue for Norton. Please click here to view the Norton Learning Site. Please scroll to see my design process below. 

How Might We make Norton content more accessible to students and professors, so that they may become acquainted with Norton and our offerings?

 

Primary Challenge: It was important to construct a site that meets the users needs of learning more about Norton, without being sold to. In addition, since Norton could not host its content marketing site on the overall W. W. Norton website, we wanted to make sure that this additional Norton website did not look strikingly different than the main W. W. Norton website. By forming a design system, I created a seamless browsing experience for the user.

Team: Leah Clark (Lead designer of College Marketing), Ruth Bolster (Marketing Manager), Courtney Brandt (Marketing Manager), Justin Cahill (Editor)

My Role: Lead UX/UI designer

Tools: Wordpress, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign

Time: 6 Months

 

My Design Process

Step 1 - Met with stakeholders to understand the problem Some first time visitors were not making or completing their purchases on the site.

Step 3 - Provided lo-fi sketches of a mock content marketing site 

Step 5 - Began site design based on the original pain points provided and my sketches, I chose a template that would address the basic needs of the content marketing site.

Step 2 - Explored the problem by asking about pain points Norton saw an opportunity to create a community based brand identity that delved deeper into the offerings that Norton could provide for teachers and students.

Step 4 -  Met with Developers to understand the technical constraints because Norton was also undergoing an overall company rebrand the team chose to use an external CMS on Wordpress. The Challenge was now getting a content marketing site to not look solely like a blog.

Step 6- Performed back-end work on the template: 

  • Designed nav bar and menus

  • Identified what would live in the drop-down

  • Created tags 

  • Populated links to drive to relevant Norton social media accounts

  • Made sure correct information filtered onto the correct pages

Step 7 - Performed usability test and identified bugs the “find your rep link” at the bottom was stacked with other links. This presented to me to be a huge business problem because if a first time buyer accidentally clicked on the wrong link that navigated them away from the “find your rep”, that is a lost sale.

Step 8 - Final visual touches and product marketing After bug fixes, created banner showcasing top grossing titles, and sampled colors and fonts from main site to create seamless browsing experience so that users do not feel extremely different than browsing main site.

Key Features: Discipline drop down menu, Tags for recent topics, ‘contact your rep’ link

Before purchasing a Norton book, students or instructors may want to learn more about Norton as an organization. By highlighting topics that Norton authors are passionate about, users get the opportunity to get a full inside look into teaching tips, author conversations, and behind the scenes info. The discipline drop down menu allows users to browse these topics by subject. And the tags for recent topics allows users to see exactly what we’ve been posting about. Lastly, the ‘contact your rep’ link allows users to find their nearest sales rep, should they decide their experience on the Norton Learning Blog has enticed them to buy a title.

 

Site Information Architecture

 

A Video Walkthrough