Marketing Science Institute
Challenge
The Marketing Science Institute’s website wasn’t providing a user experience to match the fresh and insightful academic research it provides to its corporate marketing teams.
Solution
Designing and developing an improved digital experience that leverages a modern content management system, helping better connect academics and marketers.
Impact
A user experience that fosters collaboration between leading academic scholars and marketers through improved organization of, and access to, valuable research and reports.
The Marketing Science Institute provides fresh and insightful academic research to marketing teams, but their website experience was anything but. A confusing user experience, user interface, and information architecture coupled with an outdated content management system made the MSI digital experience frustrating for both visitors and managers. With access to academic research at the core of the MSI value proposition, this project called for more than a traditional website redesign.
To develop a solution that would work well for both the academic scholars and marketing professionals collaborating on trend research and reports, ADK dedicated time upfront consulting with Marketing Science Institute’s stakeholders and subject matter experts. This was crucial to understanding what both audiences needed from their respective user experiences.
From the interviews, it was clear that the Marketing Science Institute’s website had grown unwieldy after years of updates made to address multiple, often competing, needs.
This discovery work provided a north star that made this project a success: crafting a coherent content strategy from the ground up. This included extensive work to improve the information architecture (IA) so that it made sense to both academics and marketing professionals. The team extended this thinking into a more scalable UI kit, or light weight design system, that could be utilized by future development teams.
The early interviews also made clear the experience of managing the site was just as important as the experience of visiting it. ADK focused on designing and developing a CMS experience that could be easily adjusted by the Marketing Science Institute’s internal teams, ensuring a flexible, future-proof solution.
ADK took a streamlined approach to the content strategy and website design to produce a website experience that accomplished two key goals: Meeting the needs of academic scholars and marketing professionals from some of the most influential global organizations; and better representing the Marketing Science Institute’s commitment to quality research with the latest technology and digital design best practices.
