Alight's previous website was launched in 2019 as part of their rebrand, well before my time at Alight began. The early days of the rebrand launch focused heavily on poetic phrases and gradient graphics. Although beautiful, the poetry led to ambiguity about Alight's mission, and the gradients were not accessibility or user-friendly. On top of that, the site content did not reflect Alight's current objectives or programs, and it was also extremely difficult to update this old Wordpress site on the back end. In October of 2023, my manager's goal was to complete a light "face lift" to enhance the site visuals, but we soon realized by December of 2023 that internal and external users would benefit far more from a complete redesign.
After conducting internal and external stakeholder interviews, we knew we needed a site that would be highly adaptable to be sustainable in the future as Alight's organizational priorities and objectives may change and grow. We received feedback that the site navigation was confusing and that employees were memorizing urls to get access the most useful pages. We also received a lot of feedback that we were "burying the lead" by not highlighting customer voices and clearly explaining what Alight does, who Alight serves, and where Alight operates. The old site's photo were covered with gradient overlays, lending to a feeling that the user can't genuinely connect with our customers and team members with this extra barrier.
In addition to user interviews, our team did our own research to gather our favorite website looks and features to discuss the functionality we need and what elements would just be nice to have. We also did research on website host platforms, and ended up going with my recommendation to use Webflow because of their extreme design flexibility, security, and ease of use for updates. Because we are a small team of 5 people, we knew we would need to outsource the heavy lifting of the site build to an agency. We conducted agency interviews to find the best fit, and we ended up choosing a NYC firm that specializes in nonprofit design, Antarctic. We contracted them in February for a June launch date of the new site.
From these findings and discussions, I was able to put together a mood board or screenshots from our favorite sites, as well as prompt a creative direction as a mockup of the homepage flow. These two pieces helped Antarctic to generate a refined design system for the new site. I also led wireframe work sessions for our team to create page flow direction for the agency to build off of.
Antarctic worked to design each page and we would give feedback. We collaborated together to suggest different solutions or try different elements to really bring Alight's brand to life in a clear and transparent way.
Once the designs were final, Antarctic's team worked to set up our site in Webflow at our request. By using this platform, it would make site maintenance easy and further design development seamless.
We met our goal launch date in June of 2024 and promoted the new design lightly externally and internally. We received feedback from employees that the new site is easy to navigate, and Enterprise employees were proud to have their own country pages. External stakeholders think our new site looks more professional and trustworthy, with easy access to donate on any page.
Since our launch in June, I've been able to use existing design elements to create additional landing pages, much to the delight of our marketing team. Our Senior Brand Writer has been taking full advantage of the Editor side of Webflow to edit the content right on the site pages and swiftly publish blog posts. We are still learning the ins and outs of how our site has been set up by Antarctic, but so far it has been a smooth transition.
Alight's new site not only provides solutions to all the issues the previous site had, but it elevates Alight's first brand impression in such a significant way. Featuring the beautiful colors and textured elements of Alight's brand, the site is joyful yet maintains a clean and easy-to-follow content flow for the serious nature of Alight's work. The site's logical navigation helps to transparently present Alight's work, and it's easy to help support Alight's programs because the user is always only one click away from donating (thanks to the built-in donation button within our top navigation menu). Wearealight.org instills donor trust and a pleasant user experience, all around.
