Follett and Powered by Action

Struggling to Modernize

This is an educational book distributor that acts as a middle-man between book publishers (Penguin, Harper Collins, Pearson, etc.) and educational institutions (grade schools, libraries, and universities). They work on a legacy business model based on personal relationships between their clients and their sales reps. While they are confident in their ability to maintain relationships with current clients, their hope is to lessen the burden on the sales reps by ramping up their e-commerce solution.

One Website, Two Clients

The problem is that they receive significant revenue from the educational institutions that purchase books and the publishers that pay for ad space. There are separate sales and marketing teams for each revenue stream, and both vying for space on the company’s e-commerce homepage.

Middle Ground

Follett hired me as a contractor to conduct User Experience interviews, do competitive research, and wireframe a solution. For three months I interviewed the stakeholders and worked with their technology team before presenting my solution to their managing Vice President (they put Product, Engineering, and Marketing for their e-commerce site within one “Technology” department).

We needed a way to market a single page towards numerous kinds of Nonprofits including that included educational, environmental, health, international, and more. Additionally, we were trying to introduce different technological concepts to one of the least technically adapt industries.

The core of the product was essentially a Facebook community page with more guardrails, the challenge here was the requirement to be able to post to a complicated hierarchy of communities designed in a tree. The requirements included the ability to post privately to individuals, privately to your community, and publicly to other communities - while having those threads continue on each community with the proper permissions.

Another feature was a cloud storage page similar to Dropbox or Google Drive designed to let all the members of the community access information in a single, organized location. It was also a repository for recorded webinars, where the admins could create an educational video series. One of the challenges was the organization complexity requested by the CEO, which included folders/tags, sharing across communities, and individual permissions within communities.