Smurfit WestRock Discovery
Industry
Paper and Packaging
Client
Smurfit WestRock
Service
Senior UX Consultant
Date
April - June 2024
Crafting a Unified Digital Experience for the World’s Largest Packaging Giant
How SingleStone & WayPath Consulting led the website assessment for Smurfit Kappa & WestRock’s Merger
Process
We kicked off discovery with conducting user interface, user experience and performance audits of both websites. Due to the quick timeline of the project, leveraging open source auditing tools like Stark, Capain, Yellow Lab Tools, GTMetrix and ITRS Uptrends was vital for the success of the project.
The audits grounded our team for the next phase of the project, interviewing 20+ leaders from both organizations in 6 different countries to assess their viewpoints of the website's purpose.
Interesting Findings
Divergence of views for websites' role in lead generation and customer engagement.
Need for consistent branding and messaging across the merged website.
Lack of well-defined governance modal and content management process.
Results
User Interface
Consistency needed for accordions, buttons, cards, inputs, icons, links and videos.
User Experience & Accessibility
Main Areas of Concerns: Color contrast, text over images, inputs without labels and responsive defects
Performance
Main Areas of Concerns: Page weight, Javascript complexity and web fonts
In Conclusion
After leaders were able to provide more context around the root causes of our website audit findings, we were ready to deliver our recommendations and UX artifacts to the client:
I leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to craft 10 inclusive personas to highlight the diversity of behaviors and work styles to improve the user experience. By also providing an interactive prototype of the personas, the client could click on any logo to learn more about that user's favorite brands & tool.
I leveraged the NN/g Journey Mapping Template to craft 3 journey maps for their new website target audiences, the Emergent Buyer, Employees & Investors
For my first discovery project, I was honored to help the UX team advocate for additional resources. This research laid the groundwork for a truly unified company identity, values, and vision of the new website launching in summer 2025.
