Opportunity

An up-and-coming Silicon Valley firm—Nimsoft—provides integrated, modern IT management solutions for more than 1,000 enterprise and service provider customers globally. The company is on the leading edge of cloud-based data center monitoring and management, and they wanted their website to break from the pack of cookie-cutter design and de rigueur color palettes often associated with their competitors and the industry-at-large. The new site also needed to accurately convey and prioritize many individual elements of an ultimately large and complex product offering in a way that engages users at all points along the consideration and conversion path. The site also needed to enable their internal sales team to use it as a tool in the sales process. Coupling an aggressive two-month timeline with near-term plans to transition to a Sitecore CMS, the project presented very real challenges to both the ThoughtMatrix and Nimsoft teams.

Solution

ThoughtMatrix began by gaining a deep understanding of Nimsoft's product taxonomy, solution offering and competitive landscape. After performing competitive audits against both new and established players in the monitoring vertical, ThoughtMatrix developed a user experience that represented a clear departure from the pack. By using a non-traditional, warm and optimistic design language throughout the creative and user experience phases, ThoughtMatrix produced concepts that remain rooted in technology yet evoked very human tones, lines and interface styles.

To meet a launch date a little more than two months from project inception, ThoughtMatrix advised the use of WordPress, a content management platform most often associated with small-to-medium sized personal and corporate blogs. The ThoughtMatrix team leveraged the open-source WordPress platform to create a custom theme, template hierarchy, navigation logic and widget capabilities—greatly extending the technical boundaries of the WordPress off-the-shelf solution. This resulted in an enterprise-class corporate website running on an easy-to-master and maintain blogging platform.

Results

Our expertise in both technical and creative disciplines coupled with an accessible open-source platform enabled us to concurrently engage in information architecture, design and development phases to greatly shorten the overall schedule to just two months from start to finish. With initial designs in hand, our development team was able to design, prototype and produce a staged site within two weeks—just four weeks after project initiation. The rapid launch of a staged site enabled Nimsoft to focus their teams on the task of creating and migrating content. It also put key product decisions back in the client's hands at a time when the company was managing many complex transitions, including their acquisition by CA, integration of a new product suite, executive stakeholder turnover and IT changes.

Ultimately, these decisions not only enabled ThoughtMatrix to meet Nimsoft's aggressive deadlines, but it also ensured that their team was able to act as a true partner in the process of designing, building and launching their website.