Blue Sky EXP · Case study
A company that builds rooms people walk into, and a site that showed none of them.
Blue Sky EXP designs and builds trade show exhibits and branded interiors out of Atlanta, for Amazon, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and Fruit of the Loom. The work is large, physical and photogenic. The website in front of it was not.
Six months, working to their new brand guidelines, across art direction, UX and the build itself: research the buyers, rebuild the information architecture around what they come for, then develop the site.
- 01The problem
- 02The research
- 03What shipped
- 04What it cannot claim
The problem
The site answered every question except who they are.
The home page opened on the COVID sister company: a masked face, the words Keeping You Safe, and a slider you could only advance by clicking individual dots. Scrolling, which is what everybody tries first, did nothing at all. Nowhere on that first screen did it say that Blue Sky builds exhibits.
The rest of the site repeated the shape. A page called Blue Sky Gives Back listed the charities they support and said nothing about what they had done with any of them. One service page was a wall of text nobody was going to digest; the next never got round to saying what the service included. Five pain points, and every one of them was a page whose elements did not support the idea the page existed to carry.
The research
Six calls that decided what the site would be shaped like.
- Role
- Art direction, UX and UI, Webflow development
- Timeline
- June to November 2021
- Method
- IDEO human centered design, run lean
- 01Start with the buyer, not the brandhour long sessions with the executives and the president of sales and marketing, on one question: why does a company hire an exhibit builder at all, and what do they check before they pick one.
- 02Name the buyer, then name the momentone persona for who arrives, a chief operating officer in his sixties who is not tech savvy and is tired of reading why he should hire you rather than what you built, and four job stories for what he is there to get done, each split into situation, motivation and outcome.
- 03Read one competitor properlythree to five sites were compared on structure, usability, navigation, content and design, and then a single one was taken apart page by page, because a shallow pass across five produces a list nobody can act on.
- 04Borrow the capabilities navthat competitor let a buyer pick the one service they came for and expand it in place, which is the exact shape of the third job story: a bird’s eye view of everything, then one click into the thing that interests me.
- 05Rebuild the map before the pixelsa Solutions dropdown became six named services, community work got its own section with three stories and the client logos, and the About page picked up the core values, the team and the timeline it never had.
- 06Wireframe the interaction, not the layoutevery frame is annotated with what it does, not how it looks: the service menu that expands in place, the portfolio card that opens a modal and blurs the page behind it, the testimonial that arrives inside that modal.
What shipped, and what it cannot claim
Eleven annotated frames, and three things I will not claim.
Home, about, two options for the services page, the portfolio grid and its modal, the testimonials grid and its modal, contact, the contact form and resources. Then the build: the whole site developed in Webflow against the new brand guidelines, inside the six months.
The first thing this study does not get to claim is a usability test. Four tasks and a set of scenarios were written for Blue Sky customers and never run with any, so the five pain points are what the client reported in a meeting, not what somebody was watched doing. The second is a study of the competitor: those same four tasks were run, but with a non targeted group of friends, which is a sanity check and nothing more. The third is a result. No outcome numbers were collected in 2021, so there are none to report here now.
The domain has since been rebuilt on another platform, so there is no live link at the end of this one. What is left is the research, the map, the frames, and the walkthrough below, which runs the old site and then the one that replaced it. Those are the part of it I would still defend.
