Cole-Parmer/Antylia Scientific

The Coleparmer.com Redesign

My introduction to Cole-Parmer was leading a redesign of the primary enterprise website – view case study >. I joined the company as the discovery phase was wrapping up and design was beginning. My team quickly jelled in a trial by fire as Laura, Ryan and I spent long hours shaping the design, building out the content and prepping the site for go-live. Once it did, the real work began.

Site Governance and Growth

Launching the new site was a major accomplishment, but that alone was not our measure of success. As was expected, there was a short-term drop in some KPIs. We added an SEO specialist to my team and I worked with her to to develop a plan to improve our technical SEO performance. Within three months we had resolved some of our key issues and began outperforming the previous site.

In 2016 we saw year over year revenue growth of 15%. Within five years we had grown revenue from $38M to $71M on coleparmer.com alone. I developed a roadmap for the site experience and entered a backlog of design and IT tickets into our ticketing system. I served as product owner for the web site, managing the backlog, working with IT on project prioritization and meeting with representatives across the business to determine priorities. All of this was managed through the lens of what was most important for the customer and most likely to improve revenue.

Content strategy and ecosystem

Implementing Process

A new ticketing and project management system

As we did not have project management, UX was responsible for managing all its own projects. Initially we collaborated with IT in an antiquated ticketing system. When leadership committed to establishing a new global IT process and service desk, I worked with members of IT to evaluate options. We gathered a list of requirements and investigated a variety of tools. We settled on Fresh Release/Service as it offered development tools like JIRA but also a robust and customer-friendly service desk. I worked with IT on the implementation and customized the setup for UX. I setup the site backlog and we began collaborating with IT in a sprint-like process.

The Marketing Calendar

We did not have the seats to move everyone to Fresh Release and our UK partners were already using Smartsheet to manage their projects. I worked with our trainer to develop a project management tool for Marketing projects. We created a customized smartsheet interface and began using it to manage our projects with the marketing team.

Establishing UX

When I joined Cole-Parmer, UX was a role on the org chart. Few people knew what it meant. I began championing the discipline throughout the organization. I setup meet and greets with members of the business teams and presented An Introduction to User Experience brownbag sessions. I setup a TeamSite on our company portal and began documenting guidelines and process.

I made sure everyone had access to our personas and created the following guides:

• Brand and Brand Store Guide – How to setup and sell brand stores on our site
• IDP (Item Detail Page) Guide – All the opportunities available on the item detail page along with best practices guidelines on product, marketing content and merchandising.
• Site Marketing Opportunities – An inventory of the marketing and merchandising opportunities on the website. How to coordinate campaigns with the email team and UX. Best practices.
• Product Prioritization – How to leverage a tool we created to enable prioritization within search results and category lists.
• Introduction to UX – My presentation from the brownbag.

I also led new employees on site walkthroughs, explaining the issues and opportunities. I recorded one of these sessions for self-service review.

One of the best ways to champion UX within the org was by consulting with internal teams. I provided heuristic reviews of several experiences for business units outside marketing and I consulted on or led several large scale website projects.

TraceableLive Experience Heuristic Review

In 2017 Cole-Parmer acquired Control Company which produced a line of NIST-calibrated meters called Traceable. These meters were IOT products that shared data into the Azure Cloud providing advanced monitoring functionality through a website called TraceableLive. TraceableLive became especially important during Covid as it facilitated essential temperature monitoring of samples and vaccines.

The original TraceableLive experience was setup by engineers and had several experience issues and opportunities. I offered my services to the team to provide a complete heuristic review of the experience from unboxing a TraceableLive meter through setting it up on TraceableLive. They shipped me the product and I documented my experience from the perspective of a customer. I provided feedback on which aspects of the experience met and which did not meet best practices in UX. I then prioritized my recommendations based on urgency.

The TraceableLive team found the feedback eye-opening. They immediate implemented some recommendations and placed others in the backlog. Calls to customer service decreased almost 30%.

Environmental Express Redesign and Re-platforming on Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The original site, envexp.com was built on an ancient version of Joomla and had become almost impossible to update. The appearance and experience were massively dated and pricing was not visible to unauthenticated customers. I was charged with leading a project to redesign the site to a more modern look and feel, consistent with our other properties, while moving to our centralized PIM and the Salesforce commerce cloud platform. The idea was that we’d leverage efficiencies from our recently implemented Salesforce instance.

I worked with a third-party agency and designer from the EE team to completely redesign and build out the site. We maintained the previous product taxonomy structure, which was applications based, but added a products-based taxonomy that made it easier to search for specific items.

While the Salesforce platform provided many challenges for us, we were able to design workarounds that provided a great customer experience and met our target timeline and requirements.

THE CHALLENGE
The site was on an ancient version of Joomla and was unmanageable. The appearance was very clunky and dated, deeply needed an upgrade.

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES

• Move the site onto a new PIM, CMS and E-commerce platform. Our Marketing VP chose Salesforce commerce cloud.
• Upgrade the look and feel and introduce the more common Cole-Parmer taxonomy approach.
• Develop a responsive mobile experience
• Introduce a parent/child product structure
• Full google analytics implementation and SEO best practices
• Migrate all existing content and support the legacy taxonomy structure that was application based.
• Introduce pricing visibility for guest users

ROLES

• We worked with a third-party agency on the redesign and replatforming
• I was UX Lead on the client side, as well as design and production
• Sada Thursby, Dwain Cardona, Joe Boyd and the rest of the Environmental Express team played key roles.
• Max Nadjari was IT lead on the client side.

Complete company rebrand to Antylia Scientific and sale of Masterflex

In 2021, Cole-Parmer rebranded as Antylia Scientific. The company had been acquiring new businesses and had changed its strategy from distributor to manufacturer. We also sold our primary differentiating brand Masterflex to Avantor. Cole-Parmer no longer represented what we had become. Antylia was envisioned as a fresh start for us that better defined who we were as an organization.

My boss was tasked with rebranding the entire company and supervising the transition of Masterflex assets to Avantor. My team was responsible for updating the content on Cole-Parmer.com. I focused on rewriting a bunch of the static pages like About Us, Company History, etc. I tasked Ryan on my team with developing an inventory of Masterflex content. We made all of our changes in production on schedule. I personally followed up with Masterflex’s new owners to make sure we hit all agreed to milestones. The transitions were seamless and sequenced with notification emails to internal stakeholders, partners, vendors and customers.

Launching the New Corporate Site, Antylia Scientific

The Antylia Scientific site was designed as a company portal to share information with employees and potential investors. We developed and launched the site in about three months with the help of a third-party agency. I served as project manager and lead UX on the client site, representing the business interests and ensuring that the site was built to spec.

THE CHALLENGE
After acquiring many different companies we had evolved to become a very different organization than the original Cole-Parmer. We wanted to rebrand and tell the story of who were were now. And we needed to stand up a corporate site as quickly as possible.

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES

• Develop a new identity for the organization
• Tell the story of Antylia Scientific
• Stand up a site as quickly. as possible. We chose the WordPress platform.

ROLES

• We worked with a third-party agency on the new identity and design, also with the website development and launch.
• Marketing VP Andy Carlson was lead.
• I provided UX support and other assistance throughout the project.