Dylan Smith

Case Study: International Institute for Analytics

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When Jack Phillips and Andrew Lightman met with me at Owen Jones to kick off development of the new IIA website, I knew immediately that their level of engagement was going to have a hugely positive influence on the project. When stakeholders participate in discovery and stay engaged throughout a project, from requirements-gathering through development and testing, it has a much greater chance of being successful than those lacking that kind of engagement.

Overcoming Technical Biases

At first, the rewards I was seeking weren’t centered in the client’s needs. From a technical perspective, I was hoping there was going to be a richer feature-set than that typically met by an off-the-shelf CMS solution. My interest was in building a custom website that would address complex features and provide rich technical challenges and engineering experience.

This is why initial requirements-gathering sessions are so important. By listening to the customer – by listening to each other – we agreed that the best solution was to go with a PHP-based CMS with a rich feature set. I was able to overcome biases I was barely capable of acknowledging and feel solid about the best direction for the project. Only after weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each approach with the customer could I really see this. Best of all, the client felt informed and positive about the technical direction, as well.

Meeting Creative Challenges

Would an agency with a deeply creative spirit like Owen Jones be a good fit for a data-driven business analytics company? What imagery and visual elements could we employ to elevate the experience? How could we organize the content in such a way that the visual hierarchy of each page represented the hierarchy of business objectives?

These, of course, are the kind of questions people often ask themselves at creative agencies, especially when confronted with the challenge of creating brand experiences for clients in market segments that don’t easily translate to visual solutions.

The branding and creative direction developed by Brandy Shearer set a great tone for the site, with well-balanced typographic choices and emblematic image treatment. But beyond the visual solutions put in place, the underlying creative collaboration and discovery between our two teams amounted to a truly creative outcome and a great, highly usable final product.

Results

The new site saw a definitive increase in traffic in the first year after deployment. The publishing and editorial workflows that contributors and editors relied on were greatly improved, as well. Out-of-date and buggy plug-ins no longer plagued site administrators, and security was also greatly improved.

Equally important was the fact that both teams found success working with, and learning from, each other throughout the highly collaborative project.