Work/Dell SecureWorksPitch · 2015

Make the customer the expert

Dell SecureWorks asked for a modern web experience that would accelerate the buying cycle and elevate its expertise. Huge Atlanta’s pitch, May 2015: an audit that found 288 navigation items and a six‑click path to one white paper, three experience drivers, and a modular, personal design system shown as a home page, a vertical, a curated home and a solution finder.

The SecureWorks home page header: Ace the security stress test, over an ECG trace, with My needs: CISO, Medical, Security Monitoring
Client
Dell SecureWorks
Agency
Huge, Atlanta
Role
Experience design, pitch team
Dates
May 2015
Output
Content and experience audit, experience drivers, UX approach, tone of voice scale, visual design concepts for home, a healthcare vertical, a curated home and a solution finder, and the technology recommendation
01The audit

They were clearly experts. The site made you work to find that out: 288 navigation items, and six clicks, a form and an email to reach one piece of content, which landed in your spam folder.

SecureWorks offered a broad range of managed security services and deep industry analysis, all great things if the user was determined enough to find them. The quick audit framed two challenges: the site made it very hard for customers to do business online (103 main navigation items, 185 sub‑navigation items, text overload creating a flat, burdensome content journey), and it made customers overcome multiple barriers to learn how smart the company was. Underneath both sat three unmet needs on the customer’s side: knowledge, confidence and partnership.

  1. Lead‑gen. Rethink it beyond the form. A lead is an opportunity to start a conversation, not a name and a phone number.
  2. Personal. Personal, not personalised: simplified experiences with who, what, when and where lenses.
  3. Reward. A two‑way value exchange that builds a relationship instead of a barrier.
02Three decisions
  1. 1

    Reframe the challenge around the customer’s expertise.

    The assignment was to elevate SecureWorks’ expertise. The pitch turned it round: create an experience that drives mutual business value by making your customers experts. Connect the expertise, talent and services into solutions that generate leads because they help customers succeed. Everything on the home page follows from that: a CISO’s perspective on endpoint security, a webcast on incident management, the latest healthcare news, a case study.

    Turned down: a brochure site with a better nav. Fewer menu items would have fixed the symptom and left the barrier.

  2. 2

    Design for modularity, flexibility and scalability.

    A modular approach designed to be distributed across digital touchpoints: at the business level it gives control to plan, prioritise and manage complexity; at the user level it customises to the large‑enterprise buyer, the influencer and the mid‑size decision maker; and it scales across devices. The home page and the healthcare vertical are the same modules with different lenses, which is the point.

    Turned down: page‑by‑page design. A site with 288 navigation items needs a system, not more pages.

  3. 3

    Ask three questions, then recommend.

    The solution finder asks what risk level you are aiming for, the size of your business, and whether you have a dedicated security team, then recommends a single‑sourced, integrated managed security and response solution with the reasons. Three answers do what 103 menu items could not.

    Turned down: a service catalogue. The person who knows exactly which service they need is not the person the site was losing.

03The work
Three versions of the SecureWorks home page header: Ace the security stress test, over an ECG trace on a dark screen, with My needs: CISO, Medical, Security Monitoring
Home, three ways. Ace the security stress test, then My Needs: CISO, Medical, Security Monitoring, the lenses that drive the rest of the page.
The full SecureWorks home page concept: hero, my needs, a CISO perspective video, security awareness training, an on-demand webcast, latest healthcare news, top healthcare solutions, security monitoring and advanced endpoint threat detection, the Concord Hospital case study, and the SecureWorks Advantage customer portal
Home, top to bottom. Perspectives, training, a webcast, healthcare news, two solutions, a case study, the customer portal: content first, services where they are useful.
The healthcare vertical page: Immune to attack, personal health information is more vulnerable to security than ever, a four-phase plan, why SecureWorks, managed security, and a system administrator in the medical industry looking for help with malware detection
The healthcare vertical. Immune to attack: the same modules through a medical lens, down to I’m a system administrator in the medical industry looking for help with malware detection.
Curated home: Let's develop our game plan, why SecureWorks, managed security with a laptop dashboard, and a personal statement module
Curated home. For a returning visitor: a game plan, the reasons, managed security on a laptop, and the statement that personalises the rest.
Five solution finder screens: what risk level are you aiming for, what's the size of your business, do you have a dedicated security team, what's the size of your current IT team, and here's what we recommend for you
The solution finder. Risk level, business size, security team, IT team, then a recommendation with reasons.
Dell SecureWorks IT Security Symposium shown across a laptop, tablet and phone
Across devices. The modules scale from the symposium page on a laptop to a phone.
A sketchbook page with page layouts drawn in red and black pen
Where it started. The modules in a sketchbook before they were screens.
04Where it landed
  • DeliveredThe Huge pitch to Dell SecureWorks, 22 May 2015: audit, opportunity, strategy and creative, technology, process, team, timing and cost
  • ProposedSitecore with its experience database for persona‑driven personalisation, Eloqua for lead data, Elastic for search and Amazon CloudFront for delivery, so the modular system could be personal at launch and smarter over time
  • VoiceA tone‑of‑voice scale, collaborative, reassuring, intelligent, confident, honest, empowering, with the too‑much and too‑little of each, so the copy could project expertise without arrogance
05My role

I was on the Huge Atlanta pitch team for Dell SecureWorks: the experience audit, the UX approach and the page concepts shown above. Huge’s strategy, visual design and technology leads shaped the drivers, the look and the platform recommendation with me.