Designing around what customers came to do

GlowLabs was a digital agency. I joined the team to help redesign the website for AlertMe, an early smart home company whose technology would later become part of British Gas’ Hive platform following its acquisition in 2015.

One of the ambitions for the new website came from the marketing team.

They wanted AlertMe to become the kind of site customers would set as their browser homepage; a destination for energy news in the same way people once used MSN or AOL.

As we started exploring the customer journey, that vision became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the reasons people were actually visiting the site.

Most weren’t looking for energy news.

They were trying to understand AlertMe’s products, work out whether they were right for them and get started.

Over the following weeks we restructured the information architecture around those goals, moving product information to the centre of the experience and repositioning news as supporting content rather than the destination itself.

The website started to reflect the reasons people were actually visiting it.

Curious how experiences like this have shaped my approach?

Projects like this reinforced the importance of understanding why people are using a product before deciding what it should contain. Many of the principles on my Approach page grew from experiences like this, where understanding the customer’s goal made the design decisions much clearer.