Boston Digital

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am in middle management at a healthcare company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Boston Digital?

My biggest initiative last year was to redesign our entire website, where we provide all of our reports for free. Our previous website wasn’t achieving very user-friendly; it was difficult to find the most recent report, and the methods and information were scattered and disorganized. My desire was to clean up the way that a user would retrieve a report and organize everything to make it user-friendly.

I also wanted to convey more of our mission through the website. We brought on Boston digital to help us meet those objectives.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Boston Digital redesigned the whole website infrastructure from scratch.

What is the team composition?

There were three different project managers, but I worked with only one of them for the longest. She had also become our primary contact for Boston Digital.

Around 10 were people involved during the kickoff meeting that we had before the pandemic. We had someone who was coordinating the UI/UX design, and another who was working on the creative side. There was also a person who did an analysis of the messaging strategies of our company.

They had a principal, but they weren’t as involved as everyone else. I didn’t communicate directly with the developers, either, but I knew that they were on board for the project.

How did you come to work with Boston Digital?

We identified about nine different vendors through Clutch, which we use a lot. My direct manager actually had experience working with Boston Digital in his last company. He wasn’t the lead in that website redesign project, but he saw their work and was really satisfied with it. 

The main reason we picked Boston Digital is that they were based in the same area as us. The other major consideration was that they had had a lot of clients in the healthcare space. We felt that because they had so much experience with pharmaceutical companies and nonprofits, they would be the best partner for our niche. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent over $100,000 on this work.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in 2020 and finished in 2021.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The average session duration peaked in February 2021 at 2 minutes and 39 seconds, which is a 47% increase from pre-launch levels. It’s also good that the average number of downloads of our final report remained pretty stable at around 1,000 downloads per month. We’re hoping to see it improve as we go forward. 

The usability of our website significantly increased, as well. We’ve received a lot of positive qualitative feedback from internal and external users, which makes me happy even though getting to this point was very tough. 

How did Boston Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicated day-to-day through Basecamp, where we had a list of open items that we would track through the to-do function. 

Boston Digital gave us a timeline upfront, so we knew when everything was supposed to be delivered. However, there were delays on their end that forced us to launch much later than expected.

We experienced ADA issues pre-launch but we had to launch anyway because of all the prior delays.

I speculated that they didn’t assign enough developers to our team. When the second project manager left, the third one didn’t have the sufficient capacity to be fully involved in the project, so they assigned another entry-level staffer to take on most of the responsibilities. This made it clear that we were being deprioritized. 

During our first conversation with the principal about our frustrations, they promised that we would be compensated for the delays, so they did the data entry from our old site to our new one.

It was a disturbing experience. I was personally insulted during the call and my boss had to intervene.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The project managers admitted to their faults and tried to coordinate the completion of the website. I thought they were great and even though we needed to cycle through three of them, the project managers were always very polite and tried to find a way to resolve our issues.

We didn’t love the first few designs that we got from Boston Digital, so they reworked our overall aesthetic. I’m quite pleased with what we’ve ended up with. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Since this was my major initiative, I wish they had used us as partners more, because it seemed like they would kind of work on something in a silo and then come back. We could’ve stopped them from proceeding with the design direction early on if they had not done this. I wish they had been more collaborative and shared the process with us, as this is what we were hoping for in the beginning.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Although I’m really satisfied with what we have now, the whole process has been so painful and emotionally exhausting that I think I don’t think I would recommend them. 

If you’re willing to put up with the inevitable process gap, then more power to you. However, if you care about the process and having a good relationship with the people that you’re working with, then Boston Digital is not the company for you.