Cooper Aerobics
Project Overview
Client: Cooper Aerobics
Product: Website
https://cooperaerobics.com/
Team: Project owner, Project manager, Product Owner, Lead Designers (3), UX Designers, Software Engineers, Onboarding Designers, SEO Specialists, Advertising team
Role: Lead Designer – Research, Configurations, Wireframes, Mockups, Onboarding Lead, QA
Timeline: 1 year
Steps: Project Intake; Research; Wireframes; Mockups; Product Design; Build; QA; Launch; Post Launch Support
Summary of Requirements
Cooper Aerobics is a comprehensive wellness and health provider offering premium facilities and services for improving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Dr. Kenneth H Cooper, known as the founder of Aerobics, opened their clinic more than 50 years ago. Since then then have added 5 additional businesses and a non-profit, all dedicated to preventative medicine.
The client’s request was to help them create an online presence that matched their values of providing a premium wellness experience. During phase 1 we worked with them toward the goal of increasing website traffic through improved SEO and advertising, organization of their website content to improve navigation, a wholistic and consistent design, offer a platform that is easy to update in the future, and to ultimately bring in new clients across all age ranges.
*This project included many individuals, sub-projects, and documents. This summary focuses mainly on the components I was involved with.
Pre-Build
Research
Step one was to collect information from the client about their brand, values, challenges, goals and desired solutions. With a solid understanding of their high-level expectations we began a more in-depth investigation. UX, design, SEO, and technical research kicked off doing an in-depth analysis of their website and evaluate the client’s requests. These studies helped us to identify what our project goals would be – elevate their design to be competitive in their industry; identify which pages to migrate and which ones to sunset; understand the engineering needs in order to support our proposed solutions.
Audience Profiling helped us understand who is using the website and what they are looking for with each business entity.
A snapshot of their average demographic provided additional insight into who their clients are.
Each of the 7 business entities were evaluated to identify their purpose, goals, and how customers engaged with them.
Page data analysis helped us to identify all the high-traffic pages, providing insight on pages to migrate, pages to improve, and pages to cut.
Using the page data, a detailed migration document was created to organize the 972 pages for migration.
These pages were organized into a visual sitemap which made it easy to move content around and nest it in the appropriate buckets.
Build Phase
Mock-ups
After establishing a foundation in the research phase we began mocking up the proposed solution in Adobe XD. This document begins with a summary of the client’s goals and style guides.
Next we showcased a number of design options for the homepage – focusing on an intuitive user experience, professional but eye-catching design and striking a balance between the needs of all their collective businesses. In all our strategies it was important to immediately grab the customers attention at the top of the page; present their brand statement so it’s abundantly clear what they offer; provide actionable CTA’s to drive traffic to their most important business entities; and follow it up with information that reinforces their brand, highlight customer loyalty, and showcase featured content.
Along with the homepage we needed to mock up a number of “template” pages for all the internal content of this website. Doing this helped the customer visualize what the internal pages would look like, allowing them to sign off on the design ahead of time. With over 950+ pages this was vital to avoid costly redesigns.
The templates included the following:
- Primary landing pages for each of the entities – these got special attention and would represent each business entity
- Blog templates – a large part of the business
- Secondary landing pages – used for pages that would have additional content nested under it
- tertiary pages – for most informational pages
- A few specialty templates – used for unique content that did not fit into a standardized template.
The mockups were presented and the client was given time to review the XD document internally. We went back and forth for 3 rounds of minor changes at which point the client was happy with the solution and we were ready to begin building.
Build Phase
Content Migration and QA
This phase began the official building of the new website. During this phase I served as both the project manager and lead designer. It was my job to supervise this process and ensure all content was built to the correct specifications and highest quality. I was also required to provided LOE estimates, set the project timelines, and was overall responsible for the completion of the final product. I had a team of designers that I was overseeing during this phase.
To prepare for this phase I created an extensive SharePoint document to record all the resources and work instructions that could walk someone through exactly how to build each type of page, step-by-step, and ensure page consistency. This resource contained the following information:
- Overview
- Linking/ page naming conventions (url conventions were changing, so this was required to avoid 404 errors)
- Instructions for each type of page (Blog, Staff biography, Staff listings, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary pages and other Critical pages)
- Examples of what a completed page needs to look like
- Instructions and Notes for unique situations
- Links to all supporting documentation
I also created the previously mentioned page migration document to track the build progress. This excel doc served as our working file and housed all the internal information for each page such as naming conventions, blog category labels, who was building each page, any notes for that page, which business that page lived under, etc.
The full migration and build phase took about 4 months to complete. An additional month went toward QAing all of the work. When a designer finished a page they would mark it as ready for QA, then a different designer would review the page to ensure quality, links, images and outline were correct. Lastly, I would review each page before marking it as complete.
During the build phase, due to a medical emergency, I had to take an extended leave of absence. By following the documentation my team was able to continue building the site as expected while I was gone. When I returned, nearly all the pages had been built extremely close to the expected specifications. While QAing their work, only occasional minor changes were needed. Within a few weeks we were able to launch the newly built website.
Final Product
With a completely new design, improved SEO strategy, streamlined and action-driven information architecture and a total of 972 page over 7 business entities, the new CooperAerobics.com website was launched.
Retrospective
The end result of this project turned out great. The customer was happy with it and it was a huge improvement from what they had before. In switching to our platform they have significantly better SEO capabilities, a design that is fun and appealing for customers while also providing a professional look that builds trust for their medical customers, and a significant cleanup of their old content.
It did not come without it’s challenges though. It was a good learning experience and there is a lot that could be done differently for future projects. This was a huge undertaking that pushed all teams involved into new territory. The scale of this project would be a challenge on its own, but it also required significant product development changes to our platform in order to accommodate the needs of this website. The inter-team collaboration was incredible, however it was also one of the first major collaborations between different organizations for a project of this size. Knowledge gaps and differences in strategy lead to some inefficiencies that we would address differently in the future.