Scaling a global Drupal site in the midst of a pandemic
The team at Instructure experienced rapid demand for their online learning solutions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their flagship product, Canvas, was quickly becoming the standard of choice for schools across the globe, and their site was not built to scale as fast as it needed to.
As a global company, they needed a site to keep up with the demand and have a localized strategy in place for the nuances of each region they serve. The translation and content strategy needed to be easy to implement and scalable for each region.
The core struggle was that Canvas was more well-known than the Instructure brand. Along with the content strategy, we needed to ensure the design of the site and the taxonomy recommendations we planned out were supporting the missions of separate products. The strategy needed to support the demand for Canvas while also showcasing the technology solutions Instructure offers.
finding a common language
While there were many opportunities to reduce technical debt and improve content entry, the goal with Instructure was to speak to target audiences in all regions and generate demos from the site. The UX strategy focused on reducing regional friction and also having a clear user flow for the target audience for that product.
For example, elementary school teachers in Louisiana are very different from University professors in Germany. How do they influence the sales & adoption process of Instructure’s products, and how can we direct them to the content they need?
built for everybody
The design of the site needed to help each product stand on it to tailor the messaging and recommendations for users of all backgrounds.
We were able to do this by implementing “audience” & “need” pages. The structure of the site and the changes we made within Drupal delivers great quality content to service these audiences & easily translates them across 70 countries.
The final results
During implementation, we focused on prioritization and consolidation to ensure the content that was already on the site and being engaged with would fit into the intended user flow. Post-launch, the site has seen a reduction in bounce rate by 42%.
Finally, the regional unification also led conversions for different regions to increase. Europe, as an example, had 3 different translations we needed to be implemented during launch. Since launch, the conversion rate for demos has increased by 23%. The new site structure also lends itself to personalization, by region and persona, which is on the horizon for Instructure.
In conversion rate for demos
In bounce rate