I didn't know what this meant either, but I only had two weeks to design this site because the client wasn't happy with the outcome the first time, from a different designer.

Okay this wasn't really the problem. I mean, they did design their original website hastily and learned that having a properly designed site would do a lot of the lifting then what they currently had but they came knowing their site wasn't working for them and wanted a full redesign.

Their leadership team socialized that the current site was put together quickly as something needed to be up for the companies under their umbrella.

A big value proposition that they hold is their nationwide coverage, this is possible from the 10+ companies and multiple locations that they each hold in different parts of the US.

This is where possible issues were uncovered. When companies want to ship something it isn't as simple as picking a location and that's it. Between these companies there are 11 service offerings and there was an unclear JTBD that they set their site up with in mind.

We simplified how to get to relevant information.

If you see previously, there's like 6 ways to send an email which made users feel like their email would contain the context of what page they sent the contact form in and would cause frustration as the current CMS would not have that information for the sales department. 

Currently you would see that the departments were only found at the very bottom of the home page where you would see a marquee which doesn't exactly make it simple to understand what they offer but that they generally do "multi-Modals".

With this information we agreed that the JTBD was for users to find a partner for shipping within North America from various locations in the US.

There are a few big competitors but they each specialize in one form of modal transportation or another. So some may have a lot of trucks for domestic intermodal (truck shipping) others have a lot of port city locations for shipping on, well, ships.

USMMG has a very balanced approach which makes it easy for customers to have something shipped to the US then transported within the US. We wanted to make sure that users understood that USMMG does this, and has a lot of reach within the US, especially when far from port cities.

The site is live at www.USMMG.com.

To set them up for success we wanted to ensure they were able to update the information on their own in a new CMS.

Services offering would be scaled depending on new companies joining USMMG. Which meant the network page would need to be updated, and the footer. 

Now that this is shipped, I love seeing how the map interaction works on their network page. They came looking for a very simple site, maybe having all of the companies in their umbrella shown on a page like they had but with all of the information on the page added. I didn't think this was good enough for them. This interactive map will allow users to scan multiple locations and companies quickly, while giving them the relevant info they are searching for.