Introduction

HP Inc. is an American multinational information technology company that develops personal computers, printers and related supplies. HP is the world's 2nd largest personal computer vendor by unit sales as of January 2021, after Lenovo. In the 2018 Fortune 500 list, HP is ranked 58th largest United States corporation by total revenue.

Opportunity

HP offered its 250,000 Channel Partners (Distributors and Resellers) outdated sales tools through 4 disjointed portals:

• NA: North America

• LATAM: Latin America

• EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa

• APAC: Asia and Pacific

The project's goal was to consolidate the regional portals into a single, global site: HP Unison Partner Portal.

The new portal should handle the complexity of:

• 650,000 users across 174 countries in 25 languages

• Diverse business units with millions of HP products

• A multi-tiered channel program

• Global, 24×7 operations

• 3,000 content providers

Approach

Project major milestones:

1. Current State Review: Heuristic Evaluation & Leading Practices Analysis

2. Information Architecture & Primary Navigation

3. Card Sorting User Study

4. Interaction Design (Storyboards, CMS Content Templates, UI Components, Wireframes)

5. Visual Design

1. Current State Review

The team conducted an Heuristic Evaluation and Leading Practice Analysis to get familiar with the site and identify major areas for improvement.

2. Information Architecture & Primary Navigation

We radically changed the approach from 'inside-out' to 'outside-in' (from business-dictated to user-led). Armed with 10,000 survey comments, input from partner forums, and best practices, we decided to build the portal architecture based on users mindset.

3. Card Sorting

In order to validate the proposed Information Architecture and its Primary Navigation, we conducted an Unmoderated, Reverse Card Sorting exercise in 6 languages.

4. Interaction Design

Information Architecture

CMS Content Templates for each hierarchical level

Pattern Library

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

5. Visual Design

Outcome

For the first time in the company's history, HP was able to offer all its partners a single global URL and entry point to all of the services and tools available within the partner ecosystem: including a catalog of products, deal registration, order management, quoting and compensation, training, and marketing support.

Third-party vendor SiteIQ upgraded HP from "Non-Competitive" to "Competitive":

Improvement in key metrics by first release:

The result: more partners, more use, greater satisfaction

A year later, partner satisfaction was at an all-time high. The implementation of the portal helped HP achieve:

• More content in less time: Session times down by 33%, but 30% more content consumed during each session.

• Increased portal adoption and utilization: 92% of users visiting multiple times a week, 84% of users visiting multiple times per day.

• More effective selling: Frequent portal users winning opportunities valued 17 times higher than infrequent users.

• Partner satisfaction improvements: Triple digit increases in partner satisfaction scores across the board.

• Support efficiency gains: 85% reduction in visits requiring support.

• Following the launch of the HP Unison Partner Portal, an independent study showed that HP’s portal was leading its competitors in three of the 12 categories of the benchmark established during the initial evaluation.