Refocusing a Community Platform
Some sites are a victim of their own initial success.
A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC. Perhaps it found it difficult to say 'No', because it started suffering from feature bloat and lack of focus. Trying to do too many things for too many sorts of audience, it ended up doing none of them well enough to keep the core community interested.
Moreover, in parallel, the Web had moved on, and so had other EC websites and internal communication & collaboration systems.
I was brought in for a short project to refocus the site. We found:
- a unique mission for the site that positioned it distinctly with respect to other information systems and communication platforms, with whom we developed complementarity and avoided overlaps
- a new 'knowledge pipeline'-based content strategy to magnify "stories from the ground" into learning opportunities for the entire community, in the process rewarding contributions
- a high-level information architecture and feature set, illustrated with a few carefully chosen wireframes
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