vertex

My retainer account, Vertex, allowed me to dive deeper into UX research while also developing my organizational & client communication skills. Rather than a project with a hard start and finish, this collaboration with Vertex’s web team allowed me to use the tools at our disposal to listen to the priorities of the tax software solutions company and refine their marketing sites (Global, UK, & German) quarter by quarter.

Being on a retainer required a lot of regular project management, including:

Managing requests coming in through Basecamp
Writing testing plans and project briefs
Communicating our value on QBRs presented to Vertex’s steering committee
Contributing to agendas for upcoming status calls and sprint planning
Working through roadmap requests & priorities to plan my UX work for the quarter

Kanban board I created to track our A/B tests

Example slide from our QBR

— WHAT I DID

Retainer project management
Content strategy
A/B & personalization tests
Landscape analyses & strategy
Web audits & remediation

— TOOLS

Figma
Optimizely
Crazy Egg
GA4
Screaming Frog
Jira
Miro
Google Docs/Sheets
Basecamp
Microsoft 365
Smartsheet

— FOR HOW LONG

1.5 years

experimentation

Experimentation was a great opportunity for two things: learning more about Vertex’s user behaviors and gathering the metrics necessary to implement big changes on the site. With access to Optimizely and Vertex’s partnership with RapidX who builds the tests, we used A/B and personalization tests to refine the site and better align the experience with company goals.

After discussing some details with the web team — what they’d like to accomplish with this test, where the request came from, any challenges to keep in mind, etc. — I would begin mocking up solutions on Figma and writing the test plan. Then, the three parties would coordinate via the Kanban board to launch the test on Optimizely, as well as make reports on any other platforms we may need — such as GA4 or Crazy Egg. Once the test ran for a determined period of time, we would discuss the results and how we’d like to move forward with implementation.

analyses & strategy

We would regularly conduct landscape analyses in order to take stock of what other enterprise brands were doing, where Vertex could meet industry standards, and how the tax solutions company could answer the needs of the market as we evolved the site. These analyses and the subsequent recommendations led to a lot of valuable implementations through the quarters.

Some of these major analyses included:

Industry-specific content
Global/localization approach
Events design, content, & functionality
Newsroom design, content, & functionality
PDF & one-pager resources

See how a primary competitor, Avalara, appeared throughout all 5 analyses.

Industry-specific content landscape analysis

PDF/one-pager resource landscape analysis

audits & remediation

Audits and remediation were also a frequent part of the retainer, working improvements into our ≈3-week sprint refinements. Sometimes this would involve collaborating with our analytics consultant to find areas of opportunity; other times it would be auditing the site alongside our UX designer from both a UX & UI perspective.

Some examples include audits of:

Resource center taxonomy filters
UX/UI mobile optimization
Internal linking, URLs, and breadcrumbs

Resource center taxonomy filters

UX/UI mobile optimization

Internal linking, URLs, and breadcrumbs