The approach

While strategic and content workshops for the site were happening, we simultaneously began element collage work to visualize how the new web experience could take shape. It was devoid of real content at this point, and more conceptual, but with the knowledge of the types of content we'd be working with along with standard web components, we had the pieces we needed to play with.

Admittedly, this was a bit of a mind-shift for me, since content should always come first and thus dictate what we were designing, but this approach actually allowed for the freedom to play and even consider new ideas for displaying content.

Desktop first?

With enterprise IT executives, laptops and desktops are still a key screen size and this was the audience we were speaking to. We chose to explore primarily on desktop screen sizes for this reason, but we simultaneously considered how much of this exploration would play out on mobile screen sizes as well. Below is a broad spectrum of the exploration I worked on for this project. You'll notice a lot of variety in style since this truly was exploritive.

Mobile exploration

As mentioned, most of the exploration was done for desktop screen sizes with the intent to flesh out mobile layouts further down the road, but we needed to test out some of the ideas on mobile out of the gate to ensure things would work responsively.

The goal was to make each interaction with the navigation or the search field a more focused interaction - that's why we were exploring full-screen nav takeovers and more focused search experiences that you see below.