I recently led and launched a new initiative at my brand-new full-time job: a multimedia content repository where all of our videos, podcasts, graphics, etc. could live in one place.
This was envisioned as being a serendipitous experience for the user: He or she could click around and find different types of content about different topic areas. The project also sought to meet one of our organization’s goals of giving all of our therapeutic areas equal play in featured content.
This was a particular challenge for me, as I was tasked with building a “pilot” of the feature as a year-in-review project. I’d been on the job a little over a month, so I wasn’t involved in creating much of the content that would need to be featured.
That’s right: It was time for a content deep-dive.
After much trawling through our website, YouTube channel, and support from my colleagues, we came up with a robust list of 50+ pieces of content that we could reasonably see including in the project.
We know we would need to narrow this for the pilot–so it was time for some tough decisions, keeping variation in type of content at top of mind, as well as giving all of our therapeutic areas equal love!
I then wrote teasers for each piece of content and inserted them into some fun, colorful blocks built by our design team. I narrowed my focus to interesting facts, statistics, quotes, or questions that would pique the user’s interest and get him or her to click through to learn more.
I paired this with posts for our social channels to drive traffic to the new page and to get people on their way to learning more about our organization’s insights!
This is an evolving project–in the future, we hope to implement a function that sorts the content so we can add all new content without the risk of subjecting our users to an endless scroll. It will also be a long process of metrics-gathering so we can judge which content is performing well, and perhaps feature more of that type of content (or create more, which I really look forward to) in the future.
In the meantime, I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to work on this project. It was a great way for me, as a new employee, to quickly familiarize myself with our content and the stakeholders in our organization. It also reassured me that I’d joined a team of supportive, creative folks who are always willing to lend a hand (or actually stay until 5 p.m. the day before leaving for a two-week cruise just to help see the project through).
The team that worked on this also received great feedback from other team members. One of my favorites:
“I know getting this new page out of the gate was a herculean effort, but wow does it look good. You would never know the hurdles you crossed, or the functionality you had hoped it would have included. It looks damn good as is and provides a solid framework for future iterations. Really nice work to everyone involved.”
Kaitlin Jansen 