I am always impressed when working with the team on the Verizon SuperPages “Advertise With Us” site. They are very consumer focused, taking every large move they make into user testing to ensure that their product works for the maximum audience.

When Verizon SuperPages released a new marketing style guide with a new color palette, it was time to refresh Advertise With Us and add additional focus on new product areas.

RD2 came in to provide Information Architecture and Design support to the team. After assessing the requirements for the various pages, looking at competitors and other market leaders, and creating the IA plan, our design team set to work. Our approach is typically to have all of our designers take a shot at creating a design with little outside influence other than what is provided in the creative brief and business strategy. Their only requirement: work the new Verizon SuperPages green into the piece. The result of that exercise was eight unique designs that we presented to Verizon.

Here’s where my respect for the team at Verizon went up even more. They picked four of the eight designs and said, “We’ll let the users choose the design from these.”

Let the users choose.

We took the four designs into a quick user testing scenario, where several people were shown the designs and asked to choose their favorite overall and pick and choose their favorite elements from each design. Almost overwhelmingly, the users gravitated to the design that ultimately became the new Advertise With Us site.

The implementation of the new site is a great example of not only doing it well, but doing it right. In our business, we have to approach design scientifically. Research and user testing enable us to do that. When a site is made with the user in mind, a company will mazimize the reach and impact of their message.