PMP Product detail pages redesign

The Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is an US$80MM a year product and is the core offering of the Project Management Institute. The Product Detail page gets 7.2 million visits a year (second only to the Home page at 11 million visits for the year), but the experience was sub-optimal for our users.

The Problem

• The legacy PMP page did not provide a clear user journey, which made it difficult for users to access important resources, products, and information.
• Website tools (Inspectlet) that monitor users’ behavior indicated that very few users scrolled to the bottom of the legacy page.
• The legacy PMP page was not providing a clear connection between converting PMP Certification pages and informative process and prep pages.
• The CTA for PMP Exam Prep page was hidden at the bottom of the PMP Product page.
• Legacy PMP pages (product page and sub-pages) had unnecessary/outdated pages based on click rankings and page view reports.
• Legacy PMP pages (product page and sub-pages) lacked consistency, had a lot of content and there was a need to bring conciseness to the experience.

The Process

The process kicked off in May 2021 with the formation of a self-organized cross-functional team including a Product Marketer, an SEO Specialist, and UX Lead (myself). We recognized that as the PMP was our flagship product that it was imperative to improve the user experience for users to reduce friction and ultimately convert. This was for all intents and purposes a skunk-works project… what we needed to do was move it along as a side-hustle and make a business case with the management team in Marketing.

After a few month pause, we met regularly to strategize and collaboratively map out in wireframe and whiteboarding exercises the right content for the right places and to reengineer the PMP product page and customer journey experience. Our Product Marketer wrote the copy with our SEO Specialist providing the SEO content. I further edited the copy to synthesize the two copy approaches and produced the UI design as well as prototyped the user experience and ultimately executed the build in Sitecore.

When stakeholders approved, the designs were finalized and I commenced the Sitecore build in a lower environment. By July, I moved the components and pages into Production to begin A/B testing and monitored closely the Adobe Analytics dashboard created for us by a UX Researcher we had collaborated with. A KPI framework guided us in modulating the percentage of users seeing the new experience and by October 2022, we determined that the new experience was providing superior results and made the traffic flow to the new version 100%.

The page performance exceeded our KPI targets and all internal expectations. Our work proved our hypothesis that the prior experience was inefficient and cluttered. By streamling the customer journey as well as limiting cognitive load, we empowered our users to achieve their goals.

The process was operationalized in a parallel workstream on the CAPM certification (which exhibited similar dramatic results) and later to other PMI certifications as the content models continued to evolve.