The Challenge

As the Director of Digital Properties for Essendant, I was asked to establish a design strategy and roadmap to take Essendant forward.

My role was new for the company, and my goals designed to complement United Stationers’ 2015 rebranding to Essendant, as well as the company’s work toward the use of a single order management system across their businesses. To get started, I dove in to the intricacies of the business model, needs of resellers by industry, and technical complexity of existing systems. At the same time, I analyzed Essendant's myriad existing digital properties. I then established User Experience as a shared service, and hired a team to provide design across departments and, specifically, design the user experience for a new customer portal.

Assessing the Current State

6 businesses, 35+ websites — commerce, content,
merchandising, marketing, AND reporting

To understand the Fall, 2014 state of Essendant's web properties, I mapped out their content and capabilities, spoke with their "owners" and other interested parties to learn more about Essendant’s businesses, identified parallels and differences among these businesses, their resellers’ needs, and their sites, reviewed analytics where available and tagged sites to collect new data where not, and discussed options and technical limitations to transformation with IT. I also spent time talking with departments that don't currently interact with resellers digitally to learn about their processes and identify opportunities to move additional interactions online. 

Defining a Path Forward

Realizing a consolidated online experience would not be simple. We aimed to fold work toward our vision into existing projects to conserve resources, and minimized rework to existing properties for an initial release. I established a proposed reseller journey, as well as a future-state property and functionality map, to help focus our thinking. I also delivered a high-level road map recommending opportunities and timing for consolidation and retirement of existing sites, and highlighting dependencies to fully achieve our vision. 

Designing a New Essendant Online Experience

With a vision for a future Essendant online experience established, my team and I designed a navigation scheme to unify the digital properties used by Essendant's Office Products resellers, as well as a customizable reseller dashboard.

In conjunction with this work, I led an initiative to select a content management and portal solution, IBM Digital Experience Manager, to be used both to manage the public website and as a framework to deliver future reseller capabilities.