3 min read
F-Secure teamed up with Columbia Road to completely renew F-Secure.com in line with F-Secure’s recently demerged B2C brand. The three-phased project resulted in a brand new web experience, a comprehensive design component library, and novel internal ways of working, as well as improved cross-team collaboration.
Key objectives
In 2022, as F-Secure was separated from WithSecure, a completely new customer security company was born. To better reflect the demerged B2C brand, F-Secure’s web experience required a comprehensive renewal. Columbia Road stepped in to help strategically plan and design the brand-new F-Secure.com experience.
The website renewal had three main objectives:
- Firstly, the new F-Secure.com had an essential role in bringing F-Secure’s renewed brand to life in an interactive and functional manner.
- Secondly, the site needed to reflect F-Secure’s updated productisation to clearly communicate and sell their consumer security products.
- Lastly, from a technical standpoint, F-Secure was looking to ensure the future sustainability of the site by moving it to a new and more optimal platform.
Upon planning the new website, F-Secure placed a significant emphasis on the site's customer experience. The previous web experience was considered scattered and inconsistent, making it difficult for customers to find what they were looking for. The vision for the new site was to provide a more consistent experience that caters for different use cases in an intuitive manner.
F-Secure was looking for a partner that could help with refining the whole customer journey blueprint, with a specific focus on optimising buyer journeys commercially while adapting all the touchpoints into the new brand frames. Columbia Road took on the role of F-Secure’s strategic design partner in the website renewal project. Combining technological understanding and a strong emphasis on business impact with design capabilities allowed F-Secure to go about reaching the goals set for the new site.
Our approach
Understanding the most relevant customer journeys was the starting point for the project. Columbia Road’s tool for customer journey mapping provided both customer-centric and commercial understanding of the web experience from the perspective of different key user segments.
F-Secure's Digital Experience Manager, Ira Sydanmaanlakka described the customer journey mapping in the beginning of the cooperation: "Columbia Road's Customer Journey Map has helped us in a big change to define the customer experience's target state and identify pain points often found between teams and functions. The strength of the tool is linking the customers' goals to the business goals, and the comprehensiveness of the tool helps to identify factors affecting the customer experience from within the organisation."
The web experience renewal was executed in three main phases. In the first phase of the project, a team of Columbia Road consultants conducted a comprehensive web experience audit that covered key areas such as technology, user experience and ways of working. Our cross-competence team included design, martech and technology consultants to provide a holistic understanding of the starting point for the project.
The second phase consisted of a deep dive into the building blocks of the site covering areas such as high-level concept, vision, scope and information architecture. Through this phase, we established a clear understanding of end-users' needs, business objectives, key performing pages and the interaction between these to lay the foundation of design work.
Having laid a strong foundation for the new website design, in the third phase, we proceeded with detailed UX/UI design and got to work with F-Secure's brand designers in planning how the new brand should be applied in digital touchpoints. In addition to bringing the new brand to life, the design work focused on page types that are intended to generate revenue – for example, product pages, campaign pages and pages for subscription renewal. The work also covered an important subset of key landing pages, including the main front page.
The work led to the first release of the new F-Secure.com and continued with both covering new areas of the site with new designs as well as laying the groundwork for continuous optimisation and A/B testing of the newly released web experience.
Impact
As a result of the project, the new F-Secure.com was launched, bringing to life the new consumer brand and renewed productisation. The end result was the outcome of close cooperation between Columbia Road consultants and various skilled and highly motivated units within F-Secure, ranging from the digital and design teams to direct business and customer support.
Not only did the project result in the new web experience but through the cooperation, Columbia Road got to introduce F-Secure’s internal team to new service design principles, web design tools and ways of working across competencies.
The new site's high-level concept, information architecture and library of designs created can be utilised by F-Secure’s internal teams. The structure and designs also cater for F-Secure’s growth and can be scaled up in the long run.