Drupal and Brightly deliver a brilliant new SaaS solution
Brightly (formally Dude Solutions) is a premier provider of asset management solutions. But a legacy brand and technical debt were holding the company back from its potential in North America and beyond.
Armed with a new name, new brand, and new vision for the future, Brightly needed a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solution powered by Drupal to help bring it all together. As a partner of Elevated Third, Brightly was finally ready to embody a new brand that better represented the company’s core.
Goodbye Dude. Hello Brightly.
Brightly’s business goals were simple: activate a new global brand with a ground-up website powered by a smart, sustainable design system. The catch? The project needed to cover a lot of groundwork and hit a deadline in less than 12 weeks’ time. Not to mention, the new brand was already being developed by a different branding agency, so it required the Elevated Third team to jump right in, catch up on what was already built, and work in tandem with Brightly and its partner agency to build an entirely new site and design framework that would bring the Brightly brand to life.
Lean, Mean Global Lead-Gen Machine
Brightly had some brand perception problems that held it back from scaling globally. “Dude” was somewhat problematic at best, and confusing to audiences in different countries at worst. The old site had its own difficulties – it was cumbersome to manage and expensive to maintain. The new site needed to be leaner, more efficient, and bake in learnings from months of prior UX optimization in order to create a high-performing lead-gen machine.
Additionally, the new Brightly website needed to present its product portfolio in a unified and cohesive way. This meant taking previously-acquired product sites that were running independently (on disparate CMSs) to be rolled into the site for a less fragmented experience.
Drupal Design, FTW!
The ultimate goal for the new Brightly site was to be a stepping stone towards a truly international message with localized and translated product content per region. This meant making the design system extremely flexible to adapt to future regions, languages, product acquisitions, and marketing campaigns.
Months of previous ongoing optimization work led to a more streamlined conversion journey. Analytics and week-to-week measurement was a huge focus for the Brightly marketing team as the brand redesign approached.
When the brand was finally revealed it was, well, bright, and loaded with engaging elements and possibilities. We had to translate fantastic “on paper” design ideas into a Drupal-friendly design system that would accentuate the brand while also remaining maintainable and sustainable going forward. This meant extremely rapid prototyping of a new design system while flushing out design variability for Drupal’s Layout Builder. Illustrative elements, complex componentry, and built-in branded color rules were implemented to maintain consistency
Embracing Agile
During the Implementation phase, we worked closely with the Brightly team on carefully planned design and development sprints for more efficient delivery within a quick time frame.
Weekly sprints included responsive design components to enable flexibility in the CMS for content editors to build out website pages without developers, mockups and wireframes, and final designs needed for development.
The Final QA
In parallel, we facilitated a complete content training and migration process with the Brightly team. This process gave the team a valuable opportunity to consolidate and perform QA as we progressed with oversight and support from our UX team
Acquia Partners
For this web project, we used our partnership with Acquia to our best advantage. We enjoyed the advantage of streamlined deployment tools and environments predictably tuned for Drupal performance. Brightly expected a huge boost in traffic during the brand launch, and it was critical that the site was accessible across the globe. Acquia’s caching and performance tools were essential—the best UX in the world is worth little when the site is slow and leveraging Acquia’s monitoring tools helped us stay on top of performance.
Immediate Impact Post-Launch
Because of the strong, existing relationship we had with Brightly going into the web project, it was easier to streamline the discovery and research process. The numbers three weeks after launch speak for themselves:
increase in Contact requests
decrease in Bounce Rate
increase in Demo Requests
lift in Pages/Session
increase in overall site goals
reduction in average page load time