New user-focused site supports Scania with lead generation

By Charlotte Naversten

Scania, the world-leading provider of transport solutions, has recently launched their new global website. The new site is the result of a year-long project that Comprend has had the privilege to be part of, and involved merging their previous group and global sites into one site.

Viktoria Hellmark works with the digital experience team at Scania and has led the project. When it comes to its background, she describes it as a corporate digital ecosystem of websites and services that needed to be better adapted to its purpose - to meet user needs and to support the company's overall strategy of driving the transition towards a sustainable transport sector.

“The objectives we brought into the project were to create an improved and cohesive user experience across all digital touch points, with a focus on findability, searchability, and relevant content for the needs of target groups,” explains Viktoria Hellmark.

She goes on to say that the decision to merge the global product and service offering with the company and news site was an important part of achieving this.

“Early on in the project, we studied the needs of our visitors through impact mapping and saw that many were interested in content from both sites. In the past, visitors were linked between different websites, which made it difficult to find the information they were looking for and resulted in a lot of duplicate content. Now, we have gathered everything on a single site, which has resulted in an improved user experience, as well as increased searchability, findability, and content quality.”

Webranking provided the initial facts

With the help of Comprend's Webranking Plus report, Scania got an early look into the type of content visitors expect from the website, compared to the content that was already in place. The report also included an in-depth qualitative analysis of the user experience.

“The Webranking Report helped us understand what the industry standard for best practice was and what was value-creating for our various user groups. We saw what we had in place and what we needed to produce. It was easy to do a gap analysis,” says Viktoria Hellmark.

She also emphasises the value of the report coming from an external company, rather than internally, from their own organisation.

“We completely avoided credibility conflicts because the report, after all, clearly showed us what visitors want.”

The Core Page method put the focus back on what is important

In addition to the Webranking Report, Comprend also helped Scania by facilitating a Core Page workshop. For Viktoria Hellmark and her project team, it was an effective way to move forward and it helped them both understand what was truly important for the project and prioritise.

“The fact that we had Comprend as support was invaluable. They were able to guide us correctly, in a professional and humble way. As we pulled away in our discussions, they caught up with us and helped us prioritise and make decisions. It was extremely time-efficient and good for establishing the common goal of the project.”

A taxonomy to last

Scania has been working strategically and successfully with editorial content for many years and has also won awards in this field. For them, it was therefore a necessary part of the project to review the taxonomies of the existing sites in order to determine how the content of the new platform would be best categorised, classified, and displayed. Here, Comprend provided assistance through advice and workshop facilitation.

“The workshop helped us sync internally around navigation, function, and structure, and gave us a clear direction and target image of what was to be built. Additionally, it felt incredibly liberating when we all agreed to remove about 90% of the old tags and instead focus on what was important to us and our users,” says Viktoria Hellmark.

Structured content processes increased effectiveness and created quality

Before creating the content for the new site, Comprend helped Scania develop a structured process for how everything from producing text briefs, writing, fact checking, and approval would work. The process was based on best practice examples but was adapted with the help of interviews and conversations with those involved with Scania's internal organisation.

“Having an established and clear process flow and choosing GatherContent as a tool has really saved us a lot of time,” says Viktoria, adding that the GatherContent tool will remain in use for future production and content updates.

New design perspectives gave a visual boost

Most of the work on the content, technology, and design of the new site was carried out by Scania's own employees. Having a large and competent in-house team is often a strength, however, looking for input from the outside can sometimes be valuable and help make the end product even better – especially when it comes to visual design.

“Obtaining professional design and UX support when it came to designing the homepage was incredibly valuable, and since Comprend had been involved in supporting strategic points throughout the project, many thoughts and ideas could be reused. We simply got the best of two worlds – an outsider perspective with the user in focus, which could then be developed internally by us,” says Viktoria Hellmark.

A solid foundation to build on

The new site was launched in April, but for Viktoria and her team the work is not over yet. Now, the focus is on taking this further - both in ensuring the continued high quality of the newly launched site and in taking this development journey to local market sites.

“We work in a data-driven way in order to maintain the quality of the global site. Together with the content owners, we have set up a number of dashboards in Adobe Analytics that we continuously check to verify that KPIs are in line with what we intended,” she says.

They have also created a cross-functional editorial board that makes decisions on an ongoing basis, as well as a steering group that reviews the content at a more strategic level.

Work on the local sites will continue in much the same way as with the global site, by working with MVPs and having cross-functional teams that include people from both global and local levels, as well as people from the business side and IT.

“Working with impact mapping, user journeys, and page briefs has made the project clear and has helped everyone involved visualise the target results, so we will continue to do so and also maintain the same content production process.”

But the team also brings along some valuable lessons from the past year:

“The importance of communication and internal support when it comes to goals, priorities, and budget, both from high up in the organisation and in the various working groups from around the company. You save a lot of time and energy by getting all parts of the production chain involved early in the project and setting a target that it is clear and hopefully accepted by all parties. We thought we were careful about this and had a large cross-functional working group including users, as well as the business and the IT side right from the beginning. You get so much insight and understanding by listening and we will continue to do so.”

Viktoria also says that the work on the local sites will focus on usability and visitor needs, as well as features such as lead capture and lead generation.

“Our goal is to help markets from around the world get closer to their customers, so we will continue to listen to the needs of our markets and visitors, try to understand the expectations they have, and provide them with a positive brand experience by adding value to them,” she concludes.