Our Client
For more than 185 years, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has been a global leader in the publishing industry by delivering world-class literary content. Beyond this, their aim is to position themselves as a premier learning resource that meets the needs of Pre K – 12 students by sharing relevant content and services for students, parents, and teachers.
The Goal
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was looking for a technology collaborator to develop a navigation system for their main website to organize and optimize the 30 disparate websites underneath the HMHco umbrella, allowing a simplified user experience. In order to achieve this objective, HMH reached out to Dom and Tom to completely redesign their website to modernize and generate a constant, uncluttered flow throughout its entirety.
Our Plan & Process
HMH wanted to simplify a user’s purchasing journey. In order to achieve this goal, the Dom & Tom team redeveloped their site in a series of two parts: the first was focused on redesigning the homepage and the second was reorganizing the product pages with a clean and constant navigation system. Following that, the site’s flow was redesigned around two distinct user types — parents and teachers.
The team began by reviewing existing user data, looking at how they explored the site and identified pain points in navigation and e-commerce flow. Taking what they found, the team conducted user testing, competitive analysis, and interview panels with parents and teachers, focusing on how they searched and purchased books.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt already had an existing CMS, which presented as a complex challenge. The website needed to stay live while the upgrades were made, which meant that the team had to make the most of the legacy platforms.
The Results
As a result of the re-launch of the website, there was a 40% increase in user engagement after new UX checkout flows were implemented and a 15% decrease in page load times.