A New Face for Quest Software

Background

Quest, is a privately held software company headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, United States. Quest provides cloud management, software as a service, security, workforce mobility, and backup & recovery. The company was founded in 1987 and has 53 offices in 24 countries.

In my fourth year at Quest, we set out to completely update the homepage. Using analytics, we set out to modernize the brand, help inform customers of our offerings, and attempted to better position ourselves as a company targeting database professionals. Under the guidance of our creative team lead and creative director, I co-led this design with another senior designer on my team.

Pain Points

Some of the site’s most glaring issues were:

• It was outdated - Between old brand visual elements, a hero image that had not changed for years, and inconsistent colors and spacing, there was much to refresh. It also fell behind competitors in terms of modern appeal.

• Offerings were difficult to navigate- Many sections were filled with copy and design elements that weren’t particularly helpful to customers or aimed at how we could help their companies.

• Organization- The fold was not quite considered enough, we didn’t have all of the elements users were looking for, and thus the bounce rate was higher than intended.

Research

On this project the web development team helped us out a lot in providing information on our most visited pages and what pages led to the most conversion. From that we were able to determine the most important sections to include, have above the fold, and how to best organize our offerings.

We also did a competitive analysis of some of the companies with the biggest market share in our field. In seeking to stand out, we also researched websites of companies in other verticals.

Prototyping and Testing

We did an A/B test with the original homepage before the full release. Seeing the results we wanted, and people using the homepage as intended was enough to fully implement it for all users.

Challenges and Solutions

Since the portfolio of products Quest offers is quite large, organizing the products into usable sections while highlighting some of the more household names was a challenge. Talks including the product managers helped clarify and organize these in such a way to be more identifiable to customers.

In addition, some of the visual choices we made (such as pill shaped buttons, gradients, the swirl on the hero image) were newer to the brand, so there was some level of uncertainty in how it would be received. Most of the feedback has been positive from stakeholders.

Results

In addition to positive feedback from product managers and leadership, through our testing, we were able to reduce the bounce rate of 20% through the redesign, and we were thrilled by that result.

Reflection

This was a huge collaborative effort that was extremely iterative and would not have been possible without a great team. From the hero image we worked with the multimedia team on to the back end with the web development team, there were many moving parts necessary to bring this together. It was super exciting to see a high profile project like this be released and succeed in such a way it did. It definitely looks different from our original drafts, but I have no regrets.

Areas for improvement

The release was relatively recent - I think we will need to continue monitoring to get more statistics and see how we can improve and refresh the page next. Since the web is continually growing and evolving always, the homepage will need to as well. It has come a long way since the last redesign and hopefully will continue to grow and change. As the old adage goes: stagnation is death. This especially rings true for a company on the cutting edge of security and IT management.

Conclusion

In this redesign we set out to evolve the look and feel of Quest through the homepage. We were able to reduce the bounce rate significantly as well as highlight the elements most important to our users.