Jotun: from the customer journey to the new website

About the project

With 10,000 employees and a presence in over 100 countries, Jotun serves various customer segments with different needs and preferences. This client asked us to help them develop and launch a brand-new website. Jotun wanted to make it easier for their clients in the professional market to find relevant products and services. The new website also had to streamline finding information about the company, culture and career opportunities at Jotun.

The challenge

This project had at least four different challenges. Our client wanted to:

1. Improve website navigation,
2. Facilitate searching for the best products and services,
3. Shorten the customer journey,
4. Use behavioral web data across the customer journey.

Jotun’s clients needed a short journey leading to the goal – finding and discovering the best product or service. The company wanted to help their clients find relevant information about how Jotun's products and services more easily. That was important because company’s offer is quite extensive and it comprises diverse industries and niches as architecture and design, infrastructure, shipping, light industry and energy. Therefore, finding the best solution is not always easy.

In order for our client to succeed as a global brand, the digital channels had to be based on customer journey mapping and be fully user-oriented. Jotun wanted to:

• Map the digital behavior of customers in the professional market,
• Find out how they work when planning new projects,
• Map potential for connecting data across customer-facing systems,
• Identify areas for improvement,
• Conduct a competitor analysis.

The insight from this work was then used to design and develop an all-new website for this client.

Our approach

NoA Ignite was responsible for process management, UX design and the development of the new website. We also planned and identified business opportunities and priorities for their Customer Data Platform. In addition, we contributed to the content strategy and migrated large amounts of content from the old website to the new one. Our work was much easier thanks to the support from Jotun's technical resources.

The collaboration was divided into two phases:

1. The preliminary project
2. The development of the new website.

The NoA Ignite team consisted of employees from both the office in Krakow and Oslo throughout the entire project.

The roadmap based on interviews, customer journey, analysing competitors and technology

This phase of work consisted of four workflows: business design, strategy, architecture and roadmaps. The roadmap for the preliminary project was based on interviews, purchasing journeys, analysing competitors and available technology.

During this period, we gathered all the necessary information and mapped the digital user experience of Jotun's professional customer groups. We conducted over 60 interviews with representatives from around the world to understand how they used and perceived Jotun's previous digital channels.

In addition, we looked at technical architecture, integrations with third-party applications and operational requirements while performing a "fit-gap" analysis to provide a recommendation for future technical architecture across customer-facing systems. In the strategy stream, we analysed Jotun's competitors to find out how digitally mature the industry is. We also wanted to find out what trends will affect the industry in the future.

We summarised all our findings in a roadmap with recommendations for what should be done next. This also included a development plan, project estimates, as well as a project management model for a new website based on an MVP approach.

Verifying hypotheses with the MVP website

Jotun's new corporate and B2B website was rolled out at the end of February 2022 as an MVP (minimum viable product) version. The development phase itself had three workflows: design, content and technical development.

Design goal: a user-friendly website

The design process was an essential part of the project. We started with insight work, followed by a concept phase. This part had a strong strategic element where the goal was to clarify the scope and functions for final delivery. After this stage, we added new components to the existing design system.

Workshop with Jotun in Sandefjord

Video made by Jotun and Splæsh

Content migration and additional language versions of the website

The content part of the project included the setup and documentation of strategy and information architecture for both B2B and corporate websites, as well as content migration and publishing. We had two content specialists on the team: Content Lead and Content Operations Lead. They worked closely with Design Lead to develop content-driven design concepts that could be translated into seamless navigation, intuitive interactions and flawless user experience.

The content advisors from NoA Ignite have worked closely with Jotun's content managers, product owners and the entire marketing department. Through workshops, gathering insight and reviewing existing content, they defined new content structures while working closely with tech experts to facilitate segmentation of content based on the client’s segment and the market.

Through this collaboration, hundreds of pages were moved from the old CMS and adapted to new web pages, and our content consultants were responsible for the migration and publication in Optimizely. We also worked with several freelancers and had to manage their work as well.

After this phase of the content work, we assisted Jotun with updates and further development of their web pages. At the same time, we conducted training for Jotun's global and regional content teams to show them how to operate the new CMS platform.

Technical development in Optimizely

In the technical development stage, a team consisting of architects, front-end and back-end developers worked on configuring the Optimizely DXP platform, setting up integrations with third-party applications, and developing the pages based on the design sketches from the designers. Here, we worked according to modern, flexible development principles with a sprint-based approach in close collaboration with Jotun. Thanks to working with processes and testing procedures for delivered products, we could provide high-quality content for the CMS system.

Here is the list of applications that we integrated with the Jotun website:

• File API
• Optimizely Commerce instance
• Google Tag Manager
• Azure AD
• Qbrick
• Optimizely Search and Navigation
• Optimizely Data Platform

A large part of the technical product development consisted of setting up and configuring a completely new product search. This was challenging but extremely important for Jotun. Many of Jotun's customers live and work in different countries, and the company's products differ based on the region. In such a situation, product search had to be well thought out.

The product database was indexed in Optimizely's advanced Search & Navigation engine. This engine was then used to extract categories, thanks to which the user can simply select the desired product characteristics and receive the appropriate result. The product finder was created with various applications in mind, thanks to which the editor can reuse this feature with preselected filters anywhere on the website.

To create a connected customer experience with other systems and to more easily facilitate data-driven customer journeys online, we used Optimizely Data Platform as a CDP. We identified use cases (primarily B2B) in the design flow, which led to integration plans, set-up, Proofs of Concept and configuration. We also provided Jotun with a mar-tech maturity plan with a target architecture and future systems prioritization based on their new capabilities with ODP.

The MVP version of Jotun's new website was only available in English, and our tech experts needed to implement 50 different language versions. They worked closely with the content manager to put in place adequate solutions for translation and workflow for both global and regional editors.

As we moved all the content to the new CMS, we also had to set up new solutions to gather user insights. The developers have therefore worked closely with our colleagues from NoA Connect to implement user tracking on the website based on Jotun's new KPIs.

Management

We have led the project by developing the new website for Jotun, both through project management and flexible process management. In this project, we used Agile software development to provide our client with as effective help as possible.

The result

The long-term collaboration began in 2020 with mapping the existing digital customer experience and continued with the development of new websites. The process was content-and-design-driven with continuous iterations and adaptations. Now, the whole website and its interface appear fresh and modern, and the entire ecosystem is built on the Optimizely DXP platform.

The project has been challenging and demanding from both Jotun and NoA Ignite, especially concerning process management, communication, methodology and progress follow-up. There were many stakeholders involved in the project, both on the professional side and the business side.

Now that the MVP phase is finalised, we are moving to the next stage, which is continuous development. Jotun has high ambitions for their new website. This includes personalisation and user tracking, new language versions, e-commerce features, streamlining UX, creating more engaging content and stories for corporate and employer branding purposes, and much more. So, our work has only started. This is also the first development project where Jotun has used a flexible development methodology with an MVP approach.

Together, we learned a lot, and we can now build on this knowledge in the next phase of our cooperation!

Part of the team from NoA and Jotun.

Back from left: Mimmi Tranheim, Andreas Krapp (Jotun), Damian Smutek, Marthe Holkestad, Adis Isovic Mildon (Jotun), Guro Grønnbakken, Lars Mikkelsen (Jotun). Front from left: Pål Malmberg, Serena Gonsalves (Jotun), Kamelia Niemczyk, Daniel Silva, Anna Lundgård and Benedikte Rove (Jotun). Photo: Morten Rakke