Absolute, one of the world’s leading enterprise asset security providers, serves as the industry's benchmark for endpoint resilience, visibility, and control. Absolute had recently migrated their website, absolute.com to an Umbraco CMS instance. Although the CMS and hosting technology was new, much of the HTML, CSS and site content were legacy and did not accurately reflect the brand, nor did the company present itself consistently across the site. The company asked The Scylla Group to re-imagine their online presence and align their messaging and presentation. 

The Scylla Group was chosen to design Absolute’s new online presence including:

• Solidify brand positioning
• Create a new visual site identity
• Create a new HTML framework
• Enhance content editing and creation

As with all projects, we set out to first fully understand the goals, definitions of success and underlying requirements of the project. Our research included multiple interviews with key stakeholders, content audit, a visual identity audit, and technical evaluation of their current site.

What we uncovered was a mix of new and old, inconsistent site content that had been migrated over the course of many site variations creating an inconsistent user experience. Furthermore, the site didn’t fully address their customers' needs and didn’t directly communicate their Unique Value Proposition. There was an extensive amount of font and color options, inconsistent photography styles, and a multitude of page layouts. All of which is to be expected when content is migrated over multiple site iterations where the user experience and content were not addressed within the updates. 

Other focuses of our research included buyer personas, competition bench marking, industry best practices, and branding. 

A brand brief and voice were extracted from multiple interviews with key stakeholders. We then consolidated our findings into a single, concise site vision. "Simple, Modern, Intuitive." With Executive approval and buy in on the brand vision, we got to work exploring the visuals.

Our research revealed target audience personas along with their key needs and drivers. Absolute.com's target audiences include multiple professionals responsible for securing and managing equipment for their companies, organizations and institutions. Their primary concerns include security vulnerability, visibility and control of their devices. Their time on site is focused on ensuring credibility of Absolute's product, matching capabilities against their needs and gathering information as they're contemplating new security systems. This helped formulate our customer journey evaluation criteria:

• Offers a clear pathway to find the product that matches their needs
• Where to Buy is clear and always available
• Guidance and educational opportunities are available
• Product differentiation is clear and meaningful

We explored multiple visual presentation styles through a design exercise called, stylescapes. The goal with this exercise is to demonstrate multiple ways we could present the brand and communicate visually. The trick was to find a balance between refreshing the visual identity without completely separating from their existing marketing and corporate resources. We found that a consolidated color palette combined with a modern illustration technique helped echo our intention of a simple and clean design from a modern entity. From there we crafted an HTML style guide that populated the content components into our Umbraco framework.

With a new visual style guide and content creation elements integrated, we rapidly prototyped copy and illustrations with the creative team at Absolute in the updated CMS to nail down our page designs. The ease of content creation and editing allowed our teams to realize ideas quickly, evaluate them, and revise without technology interfering with the process. The site came together quickly and went through multiple iterations over the coarse of 30 days before releasing the site. 

The new style guide considerably dials back the amount of design elements to realize the "simple" concept we were after. We were very conscious of ensuring the new site's look would seamlessly fit in with existing marketing materials and ensure a consistent brand experience. In the new site design, typography has been reduced to minimal combinations of fonts and styles. Colors are focused on  greens and blues with a mixture of gradients for a unique modern style. Illustrations where chosen over photography for visuals as they are better at communicating simple concepts and create a unique visual style. Motion based graphics in similar styles to the illustrations demonstrate software functionality in a clear format that is cleaner than alternative screen captures or video. Additional design elements are created from color-layered photography and illustration to create texture for a memorable visual identity that is memorable and unique among competition in the endpoint security industry.