Lithys 2016: Centrify Corporation - Community Design of the Year

Lithys 2016: Centrify Corporation - Community Design of the Year

photo.pngCompany: Centrify Corporation

Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program)

Community: Centrify Community

Lithy category: Community Design of the Year

 

Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.

 

Our community goals

 

The Centrify Community’s mission is to provide our customers with a world class peer to peer collaboration space and technical resource center. By doing this, we aim to improve our customer journey by providing them with a positive support experience and deflect support costs. With Centrify’s website re-launch in 2015, we wanted to make sure that the community experience is an extension of our overall digital brand experience. SEO is one of our major go-to market strategies, and the rich technical content in our community is a great way to showcase Centrify’s identity solutions when prospects search for iDaaS solutions. When prospects and customers arrive at our community in search of solutions, we want to provide them with an excellent UX, allowing them to easily collaborate with Centrify Experts and other technical peers.

 

Our unique design elements 

 

Centrify’s new community design is an excellent example of how to maximize screen real-estate utilization while improving aesthetics that’s consistent with the corporate brand. Our re-design mission was centered around two major themes: showcasing the rich community content with a new dynamic home page, and improving UX with a new skin that includes the most useful community elements laid out in a logical and visually pleasing manner.

 

From the top, the hero space of the community utilizes embedded videos to present useful rich media content to community members. In addition, a text announcement bar below the hero space points to the latest community news or notifications.

 

New global navigation lets users access the community from any page without taking up excessive space. We have simplified our community nodes to make it easier for user to get to the conversations they are looking for.

 

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The user alias button acts as an options dropdown, with utility links for users and community dashboard for the community managers. This allows admins and regular users to access these frequently used links on every page.

 

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“Ask the community” widget is a helpful new addition to help users quickly find community answers or post their questions. This widget dynamically display suggestions as the users type their questions. If answers are not found, the question can be quickly posted in the relevant forum.

 

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To showcase our high quality community generated content, we placed 3 new widgets on the home page to show announcements, solutions and recent blogs from community. In addition, latest posts are also shown on the home page and category roots.

 

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A right hand side scrolling marquee with a call to action enables us to promote company events.

 

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How we executed our community design

 

We’ve started the re-design project by compiling community user feedback and creating a list of improvements and issues to resolve. The internal community team combined user feedback and industry best practice to create initial wireframes, requirements and node structures for our design and implementation partner Grazitti. With this initial sets of requirements, Grazitti provided us with mockups, feedback and additional recommendation to formulate the final design. Finally, Grazitti rapidly developed the new community design and structure on staging for UAT, and the entire project was done on time and on budget with an extremely aggressive deadline.

 

Our metrics

  • Our new community design was launched on December 20th, 2015.
  • Following are some of the success metrics from 12/21/2015 to 3/7/2016 after launch:
  • 78490 visits, 5.4% year to year increase (from 74,445 a year ago)
  • Forums visit show a larger year-to-year increase at 9% (from 51163 to 55817)
  • New forums topics increased by 38% yty (92 to 127)
  • From 1/1/2015 to 2/29/2015:
  • Registered user sessions (2435) saw an 64% year-to-year increase (up from 1483), showing a much stronger intent to interact.
  • Completed registration also saw a year-to-year growth of 42% (546 from 385 a year ago)