Driving Alignment & UX Strategy
Industry
Advertisement Agency
Client
GSD&M
Platforms
Web
Date
April 2015
CASE STUDY BRIEF
Capability
Information architecture, facilitation, UX strategy
Leadership level
Director
What I led
Led information architecture and interaction strategy for GSD&M's website redesign, using workshops and prototypes to turn competing stakeholder views into a direction the team could review together.
Why it matters
Replaced subjective homepage debate with a shared information architecture, explicit content priorities, and an interactive prototype.
DECISION RECORD
Problem and stakes
Executives, strategists, designers, and department leads each had a valid view of the agency. The redesign needed a structure that could hold those views without becoming a collection of internal preferences.
Role and scope
Led UX strategy, information architecture, stakeholder workshops, and prototype direction for the agency website redesign.
Key decision and trade-off
Used maps and prototypes as decision tools so the group could test hierarchy, visitor paths, and the agency story instead of debating visual taste in the abstract.
Systems and artifacts
Workshop decision maps, information architecture, visitor flows, interactive prototypes, and a review framework.
Related content
The alignment problem
GSD&M had strong creative voices across leadership, strategy, design, and individual departments. The website had to represent the agency clearly, but discussion kept returning to what each group wanted the homepage to say.
The working method
I used workshops to surface the competing priorities, organized them into an information architecture, and moved the discussion into interactive prototypes. Stakeholders could then respond to hierarchy and visitor paths rather than defend isolated content or visual preferences.
What changed
The team left with a shared site structure, clearer content priorities, and a prototype direction that connected the agency story to how a prospective client would move through it.
Scope of the evidence
This is evidence of facilitation, information architecture, and prototype-led decision making. No business or conversion metric is claimed.
