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| View the site |
No longer accessible. (VeriSign Payment Services was purchased
by eBay.)
 Compare
the VeriSign Payment Services home page before and after the redesign.
To
see the complete design, contact
me for a demo of the prototype. |
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| Background |
VeriSign Payment Services processed roughly a third of all
e-commerce traffic in the United States — tens of billions of dollars
a year. Yet they had paid little serious attention to their Web site in
quite a while. The site had grown by accretion and had evolved into a tangled,
frustrating experience for users. |
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There were three basic problems:
The
site lacked any kind of consumer appeal.
Small
business owners — the site’s primary audience — were asked
to make a buy
decision before they
understood what suited them best.
Solution
providers and enterprise customers had no clear path to the information
they wanted. |
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| The Project |
Interviewed stakeholders. Analyzed
market research. Identified top issues.
The project had many stakeholders with differing goals for the site. I began
by analyzing the VeriSign’s internal market research and satisfaction
surveys to identify the salient usability issues. I then interviewed all
the stakeholders to understand firsthand what their business goals were.
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From those interviews I distilled into three succinct pages
the "big picture":
The
top ten issues we wanted to focus on
The
audiences we were addressing
The
offerings
The
positioning and messaging
The
design goals |
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We continued to revisit and refine "the big picture"
throughout the project to make sure we stayed on track. |
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Developed an online survey. Created
personas and scenarios. Interviewing real customers wasn’t
possible at the start of the project, so I scripted a survey that VeriSign
posted online. I also interviewed key stakeholders in detail about who their
users were and precisely what they came to the site to do. |
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From the survey results and the interviews I was able to
create four personas — profiles of four archetypal users — and
a scenario for each. |
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(Excerpt: small
business owner persona, PDF, 75k) |
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Conducted a competitive analysis.
I analyzed competitors' Web sites to give VeriSign an idea of the strengths
and weaknesses of the experience their competitors offered users. |
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Created wireframes. Built and
user-tested a prototype. I then built a series of working prototypes
— each one refining the user experience — until we arrived at
the approach that would best serve the users' needs and achieve VeriSign's
business goals. We tested the prototype with a group of typical users to
see if they could complete the scenarios we'd defined earlier. |
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Created a design that structured
content, not just the navigation path. I refined the final design
based on the feedback from the usability test. |
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One key feature of the information design was that it structured
the content on each page — not just the navigation path among the
pages. I created a comprehensive set of page templates — each of which
standardized the location and treatment of the content that the site needed
to accommodate. I organized the page templates into coherent sets —
for example, product page templates were accompanied by a comparison chart
template. |
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The structured pages and the comparison charts made it easy
for small business owners to make a decision about which service best suited
their needs — which was the primary goal of the redesign. |
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Developed a wireframe guide.
Created architecture diagram. I documented the design in a 120 page
wireframe guide. |
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(Excerpt: product
page, PDF, 1.2MB) |
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The guide:
Provided
the specs for building each page.
Labeled
and defined each content element.
Defined
the rules behind the information design so that it was easy to accommodate
new
information in the architecture. |
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I also provided a detailed architecture
diagram (PDF, 75k). |
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To make content development easier, I created a complete
page inventory and mapped each page to the page template the content needed
to follow. |
