Overview

Maxim Integrated products is one of the leading semiconductor manufacturers that provides engineering solutions to everyday technology products. 

As a digital experience designer, I served both external users and the internal users. Refining the information structure and making the site mobile friendly, we broadened the usage of the website experience. By integrating Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as the main content management system (CMS), we streamlined the web producing process. By documenting the design decision and technical specs, it made the production process more efficient.

Users

Content Authors

Content authors are Maxim's internal website users. They create and publish web content for the Maxim's website. 

Having an intuitive web publishing interface will help them the most. 

Engineers

Engineers are Maxim's external website users. They utilize Maxim's site to find information about projects they are working on. They also need reference designs to speed up their workflow. 

Product specs, design tools, and the ability to order samples are what they find most important.

The Challenge

Internal Users
(Content Authors)

• The home-grown system is difficult to maintain and integrate with other platforms.
• Web page publishing interface not intuitive and requires lot of hand-coding.
• Translation process is complicated and often not timely enough to push content to regional sites.

External Users
(Engineers)

• Current website hierarchy unclear, users get lost browsing pages.
• Most sought out information/tools are not being presented up-front and are very often hard to find.
• Website is also not mobile friendly.

Solution

• Internally
  • Migrate the home-grown interface to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), streamlining the web publishing process and translation workflow.
• Externally
  • Refine website's informational architecture (IA) to bring the most useful information/tools to most accessible locations.
  • The website must be mobile friendly.

The Process

1 Gathering Information

We interviewed the engineers and content authors. During these interviews we discovered the primary pain points, challenges, and hopes for this new website.

2 Define New IA and Test

Using the information we got from the users, we set up new IA and tested it out with in-house engineers. Only structures that the engineers found helpful were passed on to the next version.

3 Building Templates Part by Part

Internally, we started to build the AEM content publishing templates and components. Working in an agile environment, we met with the content authors on regular basis to keep them in the loop, making sure the transition was as easy as possible.

4 Continuing Fine-tuning and Testing

As new template builds and content began to publish, we continued user testing for new tools and improvements.

Outcome

Here are some quick examples of the improvements.

*Images might be intentionally blurred 

Before

The home-grown system's web publishing interface is condense (each blue field is a link) and complicated, adding recognitive workload to the content authors. The result is longer production time and higher error rate.

After

The AEM web authoring system shows clear web hierarchy, locating a page is now a lot easier. To create a new page the authors simply drag and drop the component to a template to start publishing. There is also a review cycle workflow to have more keen eyes on the content before making it public.

The web content is not optimized for mobile devices. Content gets cut-off and requires a lot of scrolling. Users avoid using their phone to find information as much as they could.

Flexible layout allowing the content to show on any devices. Most relevant and important information stays on top of the page even on mobile. Although large amount of data is unavoidable, it is now easier to read through the page.