Blue Book Services

Heading the design transformation strategies to revamp a 123 year old company

Plateaued growth!

1. Launched new company website: bluebookservices.com, with revamped infrastructure, marketing and user-experience.

Results:
• 20,000 existing articles succesfully migrated,
• 40K new active users in first week,
• 3x improvement on web score,
• 23% improvement in accessibility,
• 59% improvement in speed.

The public Blue Book Services’ company website was old and did not showcase the advancements and products that the company has launched in the last decade. As a matter of that, potential customers had no way to self-discover the product features, various types of solutions, and the entire catalog of 20,000 published articles.

In my role as a Head of UX Design at Blue Book, I was tasked to design and implement a new website for the company that not only showcased the value of the products, but also enhanced ads revenue as well as incorporating conversion of free customers to a paid tier.

The project encompassed a wide range of objectives, including re-categorization of Blue Book products, design of a new website, upgrading the marketing capabilities including ads that run on the news website, migration of existing 17000 articles onto the new platform and overseeing the implementation of the website in a timely manner.

I designed and specified around 25 new templates including 75 new component blocks for the wordpress engine. These blocks help speed up content creation as well as define UX patterns that promote consistency and reuse. I also designed templates that showcase case-studies and customer success stories for the first time on out website properly that help capture potential new clients.

Throughout the project's duration, my responsibilities included:

• Envisioning Product categories: I designed and organized appropriate product and marketing categories for the company and grouped different features by products, teams, and industry.

• Managing the UI and UX design specification: I designed the website and

• Coordinating development efforts: I ensured that our development team collaborated seamlessly and followed best practices. Coordinating between Content team, visual designer, Interaction designers and developers to ensure launch date is met.

• Conducting code reviews: Regular code reviews ensured high-quality code and adherence to coding standards and enhancing

• Security enhancements: I actively collaborated with our cybersecurity team to implement robust security measures, such as end-to-end encryption and multi-factor authentication, to safeguard user data and transactions.

There has been a tremendous positive response from out clients in just 1 week of launch and 100% customer satisfaction with the upgrade.

2. Relaunched the flagship product: Blue Book Online Services (BBOS) with brand new UX and framework:

Results:
• 30% increase in membership revenue per member,
• 1/3 reduction of plans,
• 2x improvement speed,
• 98% retention rate of existing customers,
• 20% reduction in total page count,
• 7 new product features released,
• 100% target matrix in 10 months.

As Head of UX, I undertook a multifaceted approach to enhance the overall user experience and modernize the technological landscape. Key responsibilities included conducting a thorough assessment of the existing UX and the tech stack, identifying pain points of the customers, balancing between the need to change vs keeping it familiar, and formulating a strategic roadmap for improvement.

Throughout the project's duration, my responsibilities included:

• Upgrading the .net UI framework: I researched and integrated modern UI frameworks that were compatible with existing .Net infrastructure. After numerous trials and iterations, I successfully upgraded to the latest version of bootstrap and Ant Design system.

• Upgrading the framework tech-stack: Upgrading from .Net to React; I collaborated with new CTO and digital agencies to plan, oversee and execute on the biggest upgrade to our company’s tech stack making our product.

• Training Engineers: I created demo code and held training sessions to coach various engineers on how to use a design system in the front end code. I trained engineers how to use and customize the pre-fabricated UI components instead of making them from scratch.

• Complete overhauling the UX: I designed a modular and scalable architecture that allowed for future enhancements while meeting current demands.

• Coordinating development efforts: I ensured that our development team collaborated seamlessly and followed best practices.

• Conducting code reviews: Regular code reviews ensured high-quality code and adherence to coding standards.

Ongoing Projects:

3. Developing a new risk mitigation and real cost prediction tool in partnership with major US produce suppliers to conceptualize an index that utilizes $40 billion of A/R Aging data, 2,000,000+ trade reports to create a high-fidelity product prototype, to get customer buy-in and help data-analytics team to create a working data model.

4. Establishing a strategic design vision and product innovation, user-centered design and continuous improvement.

5. Establishing user research methods to identify new integrations like USDA market movement into the existing products.