Almonds.com
Client
The Almond Board of California
Years
2019 - 2020
“A world-class website that delivers on all fronts – content, searchability and an overall aesthetic and design that invites visitors to stick around and return frequently.”
— Jenny Nicolau, Sr. Manager of Industry Relations & Communications
In 2019, Deutsch LA was tasked with redesigning Almonds.com for The Almond Board of California.
We started by conducting in-depth research to understand the almond industry and interviews with stakeholders. The Almond Board of California represents a large community of almond growers, vendors, and researchers across the world.
Content Strategy
The challenge for Almonds.com was simplifying a legacy website with over 200 pages. We took a look at all of the current content, cleaned it up, and translate it over to the new platform while bringing everything up to date. We worked closely with an SEO partner to determine key pages to keep.
New audience segments were necessary to eliminate redundancy and optimize information flow. I adopted a hands-on strategy by employing an online extraction tool to print each page of the website. Similar pages were then grouped together based on common topics, and sticky notes were utilized to label them.
This process allowed us to narrow down the main categories that became the new site architecture. While rewriting all of the existing site content was not realistic, we were able to combine sections and clean up the copy to make Almonds.com a critical source of information for almonds.
Our core users were characterized by:
- Almond Consumers consist of those who buy almonds or want to know more about their nutritional value and environmental impact.
- Almond Professionals consist of those who worked in the industry, including farmers and nutritionists. In order to improve wayfinding and searchability, we combined content into broader sections so that anyone could navigate the website with ease.
A modular design system
We developed an atomic design system that transformed almonds.com into a world-class publishing platform. The purpose was to provide an effortless method for content writers to publish on the website with design assistance to keep content fresh and up-to-date.
ATOMIC DESIGN BY BRAD FROST
User Testing
We conducted remote user testing over the course of 2 weeks with about 20 individuals by sharing a prototype link and having the users share their screens. For Almond Professionals, we asked questions about their profession to understand how they use the website and what information was most important to them so that we could create a website that would become a useful tool for their work. For Almond Consumers, we probed to understand what kind of content they would like to see and how they felt about the overall look/brand of the new website.