Domain Name Investing 101

Due to palpable anxiety around timelines, the kick-off for this project was largely grounded in understanding business goals and technical constraints. I had no access to users for feedback or testing. Meetings included a client sponsor, the original author of the learning material, a business analyst, a solution architect, a handful of developers, and myself.

Initially, I was asked to design what seemed like a “lift and sift” operation. That would be too easy. The original website encouraged people to sign up for access; you either had access or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you were presented marketing material with promises of success.

GoDaddy’s goal was to migrate the educational content to their existing platform to add value for current Discount Domain Club subscribers and entice new members to join and/or utilize GoDaddy for managing their domain sales. This complexity meant there were three audiences we needed to consider:

Given three audiences with multiple potential entry points, I was eager to workshop the question, “how do we get there?” Everyone was keen to determine the flow AFTER the person had found the landing page.

While basic suggestions were reviewed, it was determined that the navigation changes to the community site would go live with the learning material, but that the changes to godaddy.com would happen later.

Before I joined the project, it was determined that the Academy would live on Salesforce Experience Cloud, which was also the host of GoDaddy’s online community. To streamline development, we were to utilize a third-party application called Appinium, leveraging its pre-built components for e-learning experiences.

Salesforce Experience Cloud allows users to create pages using pre-configured layouts and their Lightning Page Builder. Appinium however, was less intuitive and lacked thorough documentation. Turning to my project team for support, no one had any experience using Appinium, and the team’s Solution Architect was initially absent. Yikes.

I reached out to Appinium. They graciously granted me a sandbox environment where I was able to create, break, and test my plans for information architecture and page layouts.

From here, I moved onto visual design. I was provided a robust branding guide and an amazing library full of approved photography and illustrations (the dream!). While this phase went quickly with little to no changes, it would be too soon to celebrate.

While I had pined away at page design, the original author had been migrating course content into the new platform. It was originally intended that he would leverage the same branding library for any graphics used within the course, but some graphics were specific to the course material. It was only then that the team was informed that we were responsible for this support.

You might not ask an interior designer to create a website or your next music video, but it’s expected that a UX Designer can safely operate other design tools like Adobe Photoshop. While this isn’t always true, I was excited to embrace the challenge and flex some graphic design muscles.

Time was tight (always), so I didn’t have the luxury of creating custom illustrations. Instead I capitalized on GoDaddy’s branding library and modified any unique course graphics via color and font choices to align with brand standards. This allowed both the original content author and myself to tackle the issue together and deliver on time.

I wish I had emphasized the significance of navigation in relation to success at the beginning of the project. Months after launch, I could see that my wayfinding advice had been left behind or significantly delayed.

While lacking access to their metrics, subsequent changes made post-launch suggests that the client took steps to enhance the material's discoverability, but it’s still hard to find.