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Grant Thornton is one of the top 5 accounting firms in the US, and I was very excited to have the opportunity to work on a web redesign for such a prominent company.The results of our redesign  can still be seen in their production website today.  Although I was thrown on this project just a few days before the pitch, I realized very quickly that this project was ripe for responsive design, even though the client’s RFP was not inclusive of that kind of scope.  I convinced our sales and PM team that would be at the pitch that a responsive design was the right course, and worked with them to help convince the client that this was the smart direction to go.

The change in strategy recommendation ultimately ended up winning us the business, as no other company pitched this implementation methodology to them.  This was one of our first big client wins in the Chicago area, where we didn’t even have any design or UX on staff at the time.  As a result, I ended up doing much of the research up front and training the resources we did hire, as well as our current development staff, on responsive design.

Research and Strategy

I interviewed over 60 top executives at Grant Thornton, including the CEO, over that first month.  It was a grueling schedule to get those interviews knocked out, but it was necessary to build consensus and develop a strategy that enabled those executives to be heard.  We also conducted user research in the form of 20 recent graduate hire interviews  since the firm was particularly focused on recruiting top flight talent out of college.  They wanted to make sure that their careers and recruiting experience was particularly engaging for that younger audience.

I then prepared for an extensive alignment session where we would discuss the business, website and user goals, as well as much of the content and functionality.  In this type of session, we usually try to limit client involvement to 5-10 stakeholders, as it can become unruly to control too many opinions and drive toward consensus.  In this case, the client insisted they bring more than 20 executives to the meeting in what would be the largest session of this type in our company’s history.  I ended up preparing a speech beforehand geared towards getting this many people motivated, and more importantly, focused on the task at hand.  This was going to be a grueling 4 hour session, but promised to be one of the most productive and important steps in the redesign process.  The session was a success despite the unusually large number of participants, and we were able to get everyone to agree on the best direction moving forward.

Design

At that point I had to train and guide the new design director in the Siteworx Chicago office, as well as multiple team members from our home office, to create wireframes and visual designs.  This was the first responsive design project for the team, so I had to be very hands on about the methodology and make sure to guide them to design pages that could be implemented from a development perspective.

We also struggled to create the visual style for this client and we went through about 7 different concepts before we landed in a good place.  It took many hours of looking at very subjective comments and trying to determine the feel the client was going for to finally create the appropriate visual concept.  Here you can see some of the end result of our efforts:

At the end of this phase I ended up leaving the team to work on other design and sales efforts, but I was proud that within a few months the development team was able to put our vision out for the public to see.  This was a fairly large project for us, with a green team, so I was grateful we were able to deliver such a strong result.