The reinvention hustle- A journey map
In less than 2 weeks, The Workshop Team at Li and Fung redesigned their website from scratch with the goal to be relevant to a changing customer base of the supply chain management giant. As an intern with the Open Innovation team, I collaborated with fellow interns to conduct user research, develop user personas and and provide recommendations to the Open Innovation coordinator. This article was written in July 2016. The Workshop has been merged with Fung Academy since then. As such, the redesigned website is no longer active.
To begin the redesign process, we started with one simple question- “Who is our renewed audience?” After consulting with many stakeholders internally ranging from the communications director to relationship managers, we concluded that we wanted to attract a diverse set of eyeballs including startups and other corporate open innovation units based in Hong Kong.
The following three questions/principles guided our redesign process:
As we set out to build prototypes, we realized that the three questions above would be crucial in our design process by acting as reference points for the team can to revisit whenever we felt lost and to realign our efforts with our overarching goal.
The use of post-it notes was highly valued and we leveraged cross-functional team collaboration in the brainstorming of ideas. As interns, we encouraged employees at Li&Fung to share the craziest of their ideas and avoided any sort of hierarchy based on seniority when it came to sharing of ideas.
A lot of time was spent curating the content for the website as the team believed how you say something matters equally as what you say.
The insights we gained from the brainstorming session were then used to create user personas which assisted the team in understanding the target audience better and inadvertently ended up guiding the development of the units’ social media strategy.
In addition to understanding the end-users, we also realized that an important guiding principle that was lacking in the existing version was ‘minimalism’. The existing site was content-heavy and user-navigation was quite poor. Our redesign focused on communicating the units’ mission statement and values to its audience in the least possible steps. To do this, we decided to update the stock images and replace the heavy text with videos.
All the stock images that were to be part of the new website were shot in-house with employees as models to portray the authenticity and community that the wørkshop aimed to achieve.
Another important aspect was to communicate the goals of the unit visually. To do this, we decided to update the stock images and use videos to communicate what the unit does in a simple manner.
All the stock images that were to be part of the new website were shot in-house and it was essential for us that each picture portrays the community we strive to build. As such, the models for each image were Li and Fung employees.
I created the following video to be displayed on the landing page of the open innovation unit. The goal of the video was to communicate the ‘new way of working’ that a traditional company like Li&Fung is adopting.
