Client
Global Software Marketing and IT
Service
Information Architecture & Experience Validation
location
Newtown Square, PA
Vision
A global software marketing and IT organization needed to evolve its digital marketing experience for a changing audience, changing technology landscape, and increasingly complex portfolio of enterprise software.
The opportunity extended beyond redesigning pages. The larger question was: How should a global software company organize, communicate, and deliver its digital experience so customers can understand complex products, find relevant information, and successfully navigate the brand across devices and business needs?
Minds Eye’s work helped turn that challenge into a research-driven design and validation process.
Challenge
Enterprise software marketing creates a unique experience problem. Customers do not arrive with identical goals. A visitor may be:
Researching a technology
Comparing products
Evaluating an enterprise solution
Looking for industry-specific information
Preparing for an event
Searching for customer evidence
Trying to understand the broader portfolio
Returning to an existing product or service
At the same time, the digital organization must support the needs of:
Marketing
Sales
Communications
Events
Product teams
Search
Content owners
Regional organizations
Technical stakeholders
The challenge was therefore not simply visual design. It was an information, interaction, content, and human-understanding problem operating at global scale.
Approach
The work combined information architecture, user research, usability testing, Lean UX, content strategy, and interaction design. Rather than relying solely on internal assumptions about what customers needed, the experience was repeatedly examined through research and validation.
The process included:
Understand the Audience
Develop personas and research questions around the goals, expectations, and behaviors of the organization’s digital audiences.
Define the Tasks
Identify the activities users needed to successfully complete across the digital experience.
Prototype the Experience
Translate content, information architecture, interaction patterns, and business requirements into testable concepts.
Validate with Users
Conduct structured usability studies to observe whether users could understand, navigate, and successfully use the proposed experience.
Analyze the Evidence
Identify patterns across user behavior, task completion, confusion, terminology, navigation, content structure, and interaction.
Refine the Experience
Translate research findings into recommendations for design, content, information architecture, and digital strategy.
Validation Through Usability Testing
Validation was a critical part of the work. More than 20 usability and customer research studies were conducted across multiple business units.
The testing process included:
Persona development
Test planning
Task design
Participant moderation
Qualitative observation
Usability analysis
Synthesis of findings
Stakeholder reporting
The purpose was not simply to collect opinions. It was to observe whether real users could successfully perform important tasks inside the proposed experience. That distinction remains central to the Minds Eye methodology today.
What It Revealed
Testing the Experience, Not the User
The usability studies asked questions such as:
Can users find the information they need?
Do they understand the terminology?
Does the information architecture match their mental model?
Do users know what to do next?
Can they complete important tasks without unnecessary friction?
Does the content support decision-making?
Do navigation and interaction patterns behave the way users expect?
When participants struggled, the assumption was not automatically that the user had failed. The research looked for failure within the larger system:
Navigation
Content
Terminology
Information architecture
Interaction design
Hierarchy
Workflow
Context
This is the same principle Minds Eye now applies to human + AI systems: Don’t simply test the person. Test the system around them.
From Assumption to Evidence
Usability testing created a feedback loop between concept and implementation:
Concept
A proposed experience, architecture, navigation model, or interaction.
Test and Observe
Real participants attempted realistic tasks while behavior, friction, hesitation, misunderstanding, and task performance were captured.
Analyze
Patterns were identified across participants.
Refine and Validate Again
The design was adjusted based on evidence, then evaluated through additional research. This transformed design decisions from internal opinion into observable evidence.
Responsive Experience Validation
The work also contributed to the organization’s first responsive mobile web experience. This introduced an additional future-state question: How should an enterprise software marketing experience behave when customers begin accessing it across radically different screen sizes and contexts?
Responsive design required more than shrinking a desktop experience. Information hierarchy, navigation, content priority, interaction patterns, and user tasks had to be reconsidered for a new environment. Product specifications were developed for content owners, business stakeholders, design teams, and development teams to support the transition.
Cross-Functional Application
The work extended across a wide range of digital teams, including:
Marketing
Design
Communications
Events
Search
Digital Hub
Microsites
Product Experience
Sales Operations
This required research findings to become useful beyond the UX team. Insights had to translate into decisions that content owners, designers, marketers, product teams, and developers could act upon.
That is an important part of the Minds Eye philosophy today: Validation only creates value when evidence can enter the client’s existing operating process.
Business and Experience Outcomes
The work contributed to measurable improvement across the organization’s digital experience. Following the application of Lean UX, information architecture, and content strategy:
Corporate page views increased by 47%
Unique visitors increased by 27%
Time spent on the site increased by 42%
The site’s overall performance ranking moved from 14th to 9th, reaching the top ten in the business software category. Its usability ranking moved from 17th to 12th in 2013, then achieved a #1 usability ranking within the measured category in 2014.
What the Work Demonstrated
Future-State Designs Are Hypotheses
A proposed experience may look correct internally and still fail when real people attempt to use it.
Observation Is More Valuable Than Assumption
Users reveal problems that internal teams frequently cannot predict.
Validation Must Happen Before Scale
It is less expensive to identify friction in research than after a new experience has been broadly deployed.
Evidence Must Translate Into Action
Research findings need to become design requirements, content changes, development priorities, or strategic decisions.
The System Is the Object of Study
When a user struggles, the question is not merely whether the user performed correctly. The question is: What in the system made successful performance difficult?
From Usability Testing to Future-State Simulation
The tools available today make it possible to extend this same philosophy much further. Future-state digital experiences can be validated through prototypes and structured usability testing.
Today, AI allows Minds Eye to create realistic future-state situations involving:
Employees
Customers
AI assistants
Workflows
Policies
Decision rules
Operational constraints
Instead of only observing whether someone can use an interface, organizations can now rehearse whether a complete human + AI operating model actually works.
Validation only creates value when evidence can enter an organization’s existing operating process.
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Minds Eye Concepts
,
Experience Validation
Case Studies
