How governments buy Microsoft

How governments buy Microsoft

kpluth

August 22, 2016

Challenge	Solution	How did it help?
If a government agency wants to roll out Microsoft products to its employees, the purchase process is lengthy and complex, involving multiple different types of partner companies that help with volume licensing and other services. Microsoft in Government wanted to explain this process to its public sector audience in a way that cut through the jargon and outlined the options in the simplest way possible. Their existing web page for this purpose had unexplained acronyms and terms and presented all the options without informing users why they might want to go down one path versus another – simply put, to satisfy its purpose, it needed to be redesigned and rewritten. For this project, I collaborated with an account director, UX designer, and project manager, and I liaised with the technical project manager and developer responsible for the website platform to see it through to completion.	In redesigning this web experience, I as content strategist worked together with our clients to understand the subsets of the audience and what the factors were that would lead them toward one purchase option toward another. I re-envisioned the flow of the web experience as a conversation, with a government employee asking questions and the site fulfilling what would be Microsoft’s responses along the way. This broke the page down into its essential pieces, as well as creating a user-centered, content-first design. I also created a page table to account for every single piece of copy and UI text on the pages, which ensured we accounted for all the needed copy on the page.	I’m unable to share web analytics for the pages, but this redesign improved the middle of the buyer’s journey for the primary audience, answering the “how to buy” question as they move out of the awareness stage and into the consideration phase. The audience can now understand more easily that working with a partner is the best step for navigating the sales process, and we narrowed the field of partners depending on what kind of service they’re looking for.