Comcast
Content Strategy, Interaction Design, Technology
While at frog design I led the redesign and implementation of a new digital brand expression and platform for the Comcast Corporation upon during its acquisition with NBCUniversal.
Why It was Needed
In 2012, Comcast was one of the nation’s most disliked brands, mostly known for its notorious customer service and outrageous pricing. As it made the move to acquire NBCUniversal, it needed to reposition away from telecom and into a media corporation without looking like a monopolizer while retaining some of the brands’ admirable heritage.
What was Involved
I was a team lead and director involved in replatforming the Comcast Corporation, which included rebranding, content strategy and development, and implementation of a proprietary publishing platform that brought the Comcast story to life from a number of different perspectives, such as
- heritage, value, and public perception
- corporate and social responsibility, including diversity and community involvement at a local level
- finance (investors and corporate vision)
- human resources (existing employee impression, existing talent acquisition)
Highlights
Provided a component-based design language system that enabled multitudes of custom templates while still preserving a solid user experience.
Adaptive design and progressive enhancement enabled server-side device and bandwidth detection to provide optimized experiences across the board from mobile to IE6.
Developed a custom DAM alongside dozens of custom CMS features and provided clean permissions-based business workflows for all publishers.
Sold in a nimble, scalable technical architecture utilizing Wordpress for content management UI, but stored and delivered content across server clusters with nginx, NodeJS, and MongoDB .
Home Page
The Home Page focuses on a number of feature stories across different divisions of the business and to introduce the main navigation at the bottom of the page.
News & Information
Provides for multi-faceted search across thousands of articles and a robust media and press library.
ComcastVoices.com (blog)
Integration into the Main Experience
The design language provided for the parent website was extended with additional functionality and templates for the blog, and custom components were developed to port related content from the blog across the rest of the publishing platform.
Migration
Migration of seven years of content including comments and authors, but reorganized with new taxonomy and architecture.
Retaining Search Performance
Thousands of 301 redirects configured in order for blog posts to retain search engine performance, while internal site search was integrated from the parent experience to also pull results from the blog.
Investor Section
Working hand-in-hand with NASDAQ, we integrated our design language into a shareholder.com instance and folded it into the master experience.
Operational Challenges
Multiple stakeholders
- C-Level, with regular involvement from CEO Brian Roberts
- Corporate communications team
- Diversity & Corporate responsibility
- Finance
- HR
- IT
Worked through an intentionally-underpriced package to meet organization’s year-end margins, resulting in under-resourcing and high-turnover rate of the team. Through a 14-month process, and out of 25 people, I was the sole team member that was involved from kickoff to launch.
Navigated one of the toughest IT security infrastructures and negotiated with technology stakeholders and proposed new firewall models in order to implement the technology we needed.
Plenty of 3rd-party technology integration
- Taleo
- NASDAQ Shareholder.com platform
- comcastvoices.com blog migration
- CRM and email newsletter subscription
Related Documents
Program Roadmap
This roadmap was co-created between our program manager and me towards the end of our discovery phase to outline our multi-track approach to launch.
Platform Recommendations (excerpt)
These recommendations outlined the technical architecture recommendations for the publishing platform in a way that translated benefits to non-technical stakeholders.
Experience Design Specifications (excerpt)
This document delivered the content and design language specifications for the experience. Much of the document has been omitted as to focus only on specific parts.
Acceptance Testing Approach
I provided the best practices and approach towards the quality assurance test plan and deployment processes.
Technical Discovery Audit
This contained initial discovery questions towards Comcast’s National Engineering & Technical Operations (NE&TO) team.
Risk Assessment
I crafted a document that outlined all possible risks, mitigation plans and owners throughout the project.
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