Kristine L. Watkins

UX and Digital Marketing Strategy

Company: Vanguard, investment management and advisor services, with about $7 trillion in global assets under management

For over six years, I've been employed by Vanguard where I've held progressively responsible roles in Design, UX, and people leadership. My experience spans from International Marketing to Institutional Marketing (B2B), and now I lead UX for Vanguard's Design Systems. Work samples include wireframes, user flows, service blueprints, prototyping, business case proposals, etc. that cannot be shared publicly. Please direct message me for a demo of my Vanguard portfolio. Portfolio is password-protected due to propriety rights

Company: BAYADA Home Health Care, a $1 billion privately-owned company, with over 290 offices in 22 states and partnerships in Germany and India

Objective: Redesign the enterprise website to be responsive, meet user needs, and hit business objectives (2014-2015)

UX challenges

Taking a brochure site and recoding it to be a fully responsive, optimized for search, and the largest power-marketing tool for the company required careful planning. As digital marketing became more of a priority, so did proving conversions. BAYADA needed a site that would target the right audience at the right time in their buyer journey, and then be able to "close the loop" as we called it. Meaning - being able to show that visitors converted to customers. Content needed to include keywords, proper metadata, and fast page load speed to boost SEO. This was in the midst of "Mobilegeddon" by google, when mobile-friendly sites would get preference.

UX solutions

This was an incredible opportunity to do things right. As a leader, I considered hand-coded HTML, WordPress, or HubSpot for the full responsive conversion. After cost/benefit and effort/impact analyses, I decided hand-coding HTML and CSS would allow us to own the content and the hosting server to have more flexibility. A Content Optimization System (COS) would prove to be more valuable for landing pages once our digital marketing efforts stabilized.

At the same time, the public site was due for a server upgrade. It was perfect timing and it further proved the decision to code and host our own sites was the right one. After working with IT, my team and I planned and implemented the best systems structure to compliment the new site. This included establishing 301 permanent redirects, changing the file naming structure for SEO and sustainability purposes, and eliminating duplicative content. Page load speed decreased through caching and minifying files. Through it all, one of the biggest opportunities was to make the site fully accessible. Being ability-aware during the rebuild boosted SEO and allowed the information to be more easily accessed by everyone.

Tracking leads was accomplished through the use of forms. Once a visitor supplied their name, my team manually matched leads with new customers. This manual effort was worth it because we were able to confidently prove conversion rate. Vanity URLs and specific 800 numbers were used to track paid advertising click-throughs and phone calls, thus providing value in digital marketing spending. A full content overhaul took place to include the Inbound methodology, by providing valuable content to draw users in, and continue to display fresh content to keep them coming back. An Ecosystem Site Map was created to see all of the sites connected to bayada.com to ensure nothing was missed. Finally, new features included chat and feedback functionality on every page. Visits and conversions continued to increase quarter over quarter, and the responsive redesign of the website became the number one marketing tool for the company.