Brian O'Shea — User Experience Designer and Product Strategist

Concur Newsroom

Opportunity: An industry leader has a story to tell. How can Concur better leverage blog and press content, and better showcase industry thought leadership?

Summary: Leveraging a long-simmering vision and a strong desire to move away from an exisiting WordPress-based blog - I worked with stakeholders across Concur's Marketing, Social, and Marketing Web Development teams to design a new integrated Concur communication tool. Concur Newsroom launched in 2016, and continues to serve as a central launching point for Concur product and brand storytelling.

Challenge: Concur is the leading travel and expense management SAAS solution. As an industry leader, a newly acquired part of SAP, and a Seattle startup success story - Concur generates a wide variety of types of press and news. Concur also has a spectrum of internal organizations and authors creating content to share externally with customers, partners, fans, and industry media/analysts. Previously this content was fragmented across a few areas of the site - a main “Blog” with formal posts across a few main content categories; a separate section for press releases; as well as another separate location for mentions of Concur in the news. Not only was this potentially confusing for visitors, it did nothing to establish Concur has a thought leader in the Travel or Expense verticals, or within the Technology sector. Furthermore there was a vision for telling new more engaging and interactive stories instead of relying on releasing traditional press releases that require reinterpretation and have limited visual appeal.

Read on to see what we designed, and how we got there:

Client: Concur
Year: 2015
My Role: Competitive Audit, Domain Research, Information Architecture, Product Evangelism, Prototyping, Interaction Design, Usability Testing
Collaborators: Visual designer: Lily Lei, Creative Direction: Jason Meagher, Project leveraged design work by Whitney Ault and Genessa Ottoman
Tools: Omnigraffle, Sketch, InVision, Whiteboard, Paper sketching, Paper (app), Skype, Join.me
Documentation: view design documentation
Prototype: view prototype
Live Production: view live production site

Results:

Based upon domain and competitive research, as well as stakeholder interviews - I worked to design a responsive content platform that better meets both Concur's current and future content needs. I learned during my interviews that the existing blog was limited to a select group of authors and departments, and had a more formal style. Stakeholders also reported that it was not flexible - categories couldn't be added easily. The structure also made it difficult to present a group of posts that would appeal to a more specific audience (such as developers or finance managers). Finally the structure and setup of the previous blog were not efficient from a cost and personnel POV, and did not effectively support a scalable, global strategy for content development and syndication.

Unified, simpler and more visually appealing - the Newsroom brings together Concur content, press and media in a more engaging way.

Concur Newsroom - featured story layout example

Full bleed visuals, better overall heirarchy, social links, and a more spacious and refined layout help make the Newsroom's story pages a better fit for current Marketing content.

Process:

This project involved domain and competitive research: both getting up to speed with Concur's product offerings, their role in the industry, and then understanding how Concur's Global Marketing teams handle producing and publishing blog and press content using previous tools and platforms.

Concur's previous blog and press sections

Previous: Concur's previous blog felt outdated, and press releases and media mentions were bare bones and not well-connected to content (and the rest of the marketing site.) Newsroom replaces all three sections of Concur.com

A draft sitemap developed early in the process helped generate discussion and early sketching

We did rounds of userflows on whiteboards and paper, this electronic version came later.

The project not only encompassed the reader view, but also the backend. Draft userflows for the admin workflow such as this helped to align with critical internal stakeholders who would be using Newsroom to publish content.

Early wireframes were completed quickly and crudely using Balsamiq, helping to facilitate discussion with key stakeholders and keep the project moving.

Concur Newsroom - channel nav explorations

The navigation structure took several rounds of iteration, gathering feedback from internal users and visitors.

With stakeholder feedback, we settled on a navigation structure that allowed for a flexible array of both categories and tags.

Retrospective and Next Steps:

Following a content migration and curation process, the Concur Newsroom successfully rolled out live in 2016.
Although I am no longer at Concur - if I had the chance to revisit the project, I would want to refine the Newsroom further with better support for a variety of media types. I would want to conduct further user research on the navigation schema in particular, and find ways to optimize the admin/publishing experience.