Stockland Online Strategic Recommendations & IA
Situation:
2008 – Stockland asked Profero for a digital strategy to cover the full organisation. It required addressing the needs of 8 Business Divisions, and international holdings.
Each business unit brought a unique set of requirements and a unit centric perspective to the project.
I was hired as a specialist Sr. Account Director and our budget was $125k.
Tasks:
My key task was to research the business, the industry, the market, and the customers of Stockland and to make recommendations on how to re-structure their online presence.
My secondary task was to manage this diverse group of clients at Stockland and elevate the relationship.
Action:
The research required adapting questionnaires, writing new ones and traveling to various locations in NSW and QLD to conduct on-site interviews or workshops.
With an assistant, I conducted a comprehensive series of interviews with 8 business division stakeholders and 19 customer types. In total, we conducted more than 50 interviews and focus groups.
Additionally, I audited the competitive presence online and the current web initiatives in the industry.
Upon completion I delivered top-line strategic recommendation to several key groups supported by four appendices in granular detail.
Results:
An overview of my conclusions:
Reorienting from a business centric to a customer centric IA by categorising user needs.
Focus on property sales and retail shopping centres and subordination of corporate and investment content.
Integration of multiple search strategies, from simple to complex, visual and geographical to negotiate the user with differing requirements towards one of 150 plus property or retail sub sites within the domain. See the process and concepts.
Streamlined, simplified and incremental customer profiling to develop the CRM – repositioned to a Stockland added value service as opposed to customer ‘registration’.
Creation of individualised user portals for saving search profiles, bookmarking key content and managing multiple RSS feeds.
Tracking of customer interaction metrics with or without registration through AJAX conditional search and navigation tools to provide business intelligence beyond web analytics or site traffic statistics.
Integrated CRM strategies for cradle to grave customer relationship building and eDM segmentation.
Advice on internal governance and guideline authoring to maintain optimum use of the CMS within the organization outside of technical considerations.
Integration of multiple B2B Portals for streamlined communication with business partners, including builders, retailers, financial advisors and journalists. See the process.
Restructuring the news distribution system site wide, based on meta data tagging of news articles distributed to integrated news headline widgets oriented towards sub-sets of meta data.
The biggest result was the extension to proceed to Functional Specification, extending the budget another $500,000.
Part II: IA, Flow and Functions
I continued and produced IA recommendations, wireframes and detailed specifications for 9 different sections.
Some examples of the IA:
A comprehensive, modular and scalable property development sub-site structure.
Built on customer centric content in both rational and emotive categories supported by persuasive purchase arguments that could be equally well applied to land, apartment, commercial, industrial or multi-use developments. This needed to apply to over 100 existing development sub sites, all at various stages of maturity, within the overall Stockland web domain.
Consistent structure for 35+ retail shopping centres
Included integration of centralised online feed from flex authored in-store kiosks. Focus on SEO & SEM friendly architectural and structural considerations.