Challenge
Trinseo (formerly known as Styron) offers a broad line of plastics, latex binders and synthetic rubber products. Their products are used primarily in the automotive, appliances, electronics, packaging, paper & board, carpet, and tire industries, among others. The structure of the site was a fairly standard corporate website but wasn’t serving the individual needs of their customers. Access to product data sheets was especially important. Being housed on another platform with a separate design, users were forced to deal with an inconsistent user experience as they navigated between platforms.
Solution
We developed a user-centered site design with a unique navigation scheme that adapted to individual user types to focus their attention on just the products and content that they would be likely to have interest in. We also made it easier to access product data sheets and other downloadable marketing material by incorporating search and listing of results into the new site for a seamless user experience.
Discovery
We began the discovery process with a stakeholder survey where we took a deep dive into how Trinseo was currently using the site and what they were looking for from the new site. We developed a deep understanding of each user type and their individual and shared tasks. We also learned that customers who were interested in one product type such as Latex, would almost never venture into the other two product segments.
Information Architecture
We created a comprehensive sitemap that showed exactly how the navigation would adapt to users from different segments. Users who were interested in Plastics, for example, would select plastics from the home page and be presented with a contextual navigation that minimized, but still provided access to, latex and synthetic rubber sections of the site.
