User-focused, strategically redesigned website to align Cognizant's brand identity with user experience expectations
The project with Cognizant aimed at redesigning their website as part of a broader digital experience enhancement. As the senior UX designer and creative technologist, I was part of a multidisciplinary team that embarked on a journey to deeply understand Cognizant's business, its customers, products, industry, and competitors. This comprehensive immersion led to the development of an engagement brief, outlining our target audience, project limitations, vision for success, and necessary data and research.
Initial Phase: Discovery and Strategy
Unconventional Wisdom Workshop: Initiated to align project goals with a deep understanding of Cognizant's operations, leading to precise deliverables.
Engagement Brief Creation: Defined the project's scope, limitations, and vision for success. This stage involved auditing existing data and identifying the need for further research.
Strategic Assessment: Involved conducting 18-20 in-depth customer interviews to gauge perceptions of Cognizant's brand, uncovering strengths and unmet needs. This phase also included competitor analysis and industry research to identify unique value propositions.
Development Phase: Conceptualization and Design
Persona Development and User Stories: From our research, we refined personas and user stories, identifying key user touchpoints and needs.
Define Phase with Collaborative Workshops: Engaged in workshops to define Cognizant's new brand identity system (BIS) and UX model, focusing on immersive brand positioning and platform interaction.
UX Concepts and Refinement: Prioritized and refined UX concepts into high-fidelity persona-based experience maps, focusing on clear UX opportunities and iterative concept reviews.
Execution Phase: Prototyping and Delivery
Experience Brief Creation: Transformed concepts into blueprints for design and strategy, producing a comprehensive experience brief for development guidance, with a focus on front-end recommendations for advanced interaction design.
Design Phase Deliverables: Included up to four experience maps aligned with prioritized UX concepts and personas, detailing the ideal user journey and UX narratives across various digital platforms.
Prototype Development and Review: Developed prototypes to test and refine the user experience in real settings, discussing UX/UI materials and technologies to ensure a seamless transition to development.
Final Phase: Handoff and Implementation
Development Guide Creation: Compiled a detailed dev guide for both internal use and handover to the Cognizant team, ensuring a smooth transition and implementation of the project, focusing on prototypes, animation, UX interactive affordances, and final content.
Throughout the project, our team maintained a laser focus on aligning Cognizant’s digital presence with its brand essence and customer needs. By engaging in rigorous research, strategic planning, and collaborative design, we aimed to deliver a redesigned website that not only met but exceeded stakeholder expectations, ensuring Cognizant's authoritative position in the digital transformation landscape.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
"The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal."
