During my time at Pluralsight, one of our goals on the marketing team was to expand our B2B business and encourage large tech companies to use Pluralsight to skill up their tech talent. The Pluralsight Technology Index was one of the resources we built to help these customers better understand the value of our product.
Our task was to redesign this data to guide leadership at B2B tech companies to compare technologies used by their engineering teams against the growth of other technologies in the tech world. This, in turn, would help these companies (our customers) stay up-to-date with tech trends.
Role: Lead User Experience Designer
Dates: Summer 2019
We wanted to create a thought-leadership resource for both tech leadership and developers to inform them on how their skills rank compared to overall skill rankings in the industry.
This product already existed on our website, but the visuals and overall experience needed revisions and we wanted to make the information easier to digest.
We also needed to include more technologies, as the current index only included technologies within Software Development. We planned to add categories for IT Ops and Data Professional and Security Professional.
To broaden our customer base, we wanted to focus specifically on B2B tech customers. All of these users have a role and influence in a B2B tech company.
Learning and Development Manager
Engineering Team Leader
Tech Team Individual Contributor
Tech leaders need a way to skill up their talent to keep their products on the cutting edge so they can continue to thrive and increase sales and usage.
Kickoff Meeting
Research & Initial Mockups
High-Fidelity Mockups
Developer / Designer Collaboration
Final Technology Index
I was reintroduced to the Technology Index project in this kickoff meeting. The goals were to use this amazing data as a thought-leadership piece that we could share with the world. We wanted to update the data visualization to something that B2B tech companies and their employees could use as a gauge for where their technologies ranked.
Initially, this data was visualized in a basic list that looked like a horizontal line graph. It functioned well for a single list of technologies, but like I mentioned, we had to have a way to visualize more than one list of skills.
Most of my research was focused around data visualization and thinking about what the most important pieces of information a customer would want to see.
Also, since this was a marketing and PR piece, we had to have a way to link back to the product and encourage customers to purchase a subscription.
For the Pluralsight marketing website, we used a highly customized instance of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and custom-built components to build the site. As one of the UX designers, I worked closely with the developers to not only design pages, but also design the components. This allowed non-designers and marketing people to make fast and easy adjustments to pages without breaking outside the Pluralsight brand guidelines.
This added both challenges and guardrails when organizing this content. I needed to stay as close to our preexisting components as possible, but also give the index a unique and interesting look and feel.
To get this updated Tech Index live, I worked really closely with one of our AEM developers to design the page with as much reusable components and code as possible. This created some minor challenges, but we were able to land on great design that was also un-breakable if overall site branding changed in the future.
See the live Technology Index here! I still find myself returning to this data when I'm curious about how a programming language may rank. It continues to be an amazing and useful piece of information for tech companies.
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