Unified a Global Brand; Redesign of the Prologis Website Network

The updated design of Prologis.com

The Challenge

As the world’s leading commercial real estate firm, Prologis has a lot to offer their partners. But the popularity of third-party real estate search engines and a lack of curiosity were preventing people from visiting Prologis.com to learn about these options.

In addition, Prologis operates in twenty countries around the world, each with their own web presence and needs. Prologis needed to refresh their global website, but also make their sites around the globe consistent with the brand.

The Solution

In a multi-year, multi-phased project, I worked with a talented team to:

1. Build a new content strategy to meet the company’s communication goals
2. Design an updated website experience
3. Collaborate with regional stakeholders to integrate brand updates into their local websites

The Impact

This hard work and strategic planning paid off with the launch of a highly successful web experience update. New features that we designed such as property search gave value to visitors, while the new content strategy gave Prologis’ long-time partners new insights about the business they thought they knew. User testing during the feedback sessions was immensely positive.

The Process and Deliverables

Persona Needs Analysis

The team established five business personas that represented a wide range of partnerships for the brand based on stakeholder and customer interviews. From this information, I performed a needs analysis for each persona that examined the ways in which the new website could meet their functional, emotional and social needs.





Content Strategy

From the customer needs analysis, I built out the content pillars that would support all of these needs, and ideas for the content types that each pillar could implement.

Below are example pages from the content strategy presentation that outlined how content pillars support both audience needs and business objectives, and the details of one of the content pillars with the types of content recommended to support it.





Information Architecture

Once stakeholders were aligned with the content strategy, I built out a recommended sitemap for the website that would organize all of the content into an intuitive structure. The numbering system that gave a unique label to each page was useful to track templates, content, bugs, and as a reference for developers.

An early sitemap that laid out all of the content needs and where in the site they were recommended.

Wireframes and UX Design

With the new information architecture approved, I began to create wireframes of the various templates for each page type, such as informational pages, blog posts, property listing pages, and more. Each template was thoughtfully designed to maximize information transfer to customers based on their needs, and designed for both mobile and desktop. These then went to the brand designer to update based on our refined look and feel.



Qualitative User Testing

In order to measure the success of our design and visitors’ affinity for the website, we conducted interviews with some of Prologis’ top customers. I wrote the testing scripts, managed the invitations and scheduling, and conducted many of the interviews.

With permission, we recorded these interviews and I edited together short video montages of the most relevant comments from customers; some were focused on positive feedback that validated our designs, some were focused on learnings and optimizations.

Below are a couple of pages from the test results presentation that share the specific testing methodology and how certain insights were categorized.





Quarterly Reporting

Finally, to support ongoing maintenance and optimization, I collaborated with the Growth Sciences team to examine the website’s KPIs, build UX insights, and make optimization recommendations. This included quantitative data such as analytics along with more qualitative data such as visitor surveys.

An example page from one of the early reports. It includes survey results and takeaways which show validation of the content discoverability strategy.

Content Audit and Stakeholder Interviews

With the global website successfully launched, our team turned to modifying regional websites to best match the global changes while serving local needs. This involved a content audit of each regional site, questionnaires for stakeholders, and interviews with regional leads based around the world. Our team conducted meetings outside of regular business hours so that we could collaborate with stakeholders in China, Sweden, the UK, and many more.

A content audit for the Chinese website and recommendations for how it could be updated or integrated.

Content Integration and Architecture

Once our analysis of the current state of regional sites was complete, we built out an information architecture customized to each site that was prescriptive in terms of what content was new, what could be leveraged from the updated global site, and what could be combined or removed. This helped local teams assess the amount of time and resources they needed to make these recommended changes.

A sitemap for the Swedish website with color coding to indicate which content was new, which was combined, and which was legacy.

What Made this Project Unique

This was a long, involved project with a lot of moving parts. Many full-time weeks were spent researching, strategizing, and refining the solutions that we thought would work best for both our client and the customers. I had the satisfaction of working on these website products from the initial brief to launch and optimizations, giving me a unique insight into the brand’s communication needs and the ability to advise stakeholders with customer-centricity in mind.