General Electric (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate. For more than 125 years, GE has invented the future of industry, and today it leads new paradigms in additive manufacturing, materials science, and data analytics.
As GE re-positioned from an industrial company to a digital one, they tasked Vertic to re-invent their corporate website. The experience had to cater to investors, prospects, customers and in particular career seekers.
Given the complexity and diversity of GE's business structure, users found it difficult to identify the right GE business unit for their needs. There was a mandate to simplify the experience of finding information across the many GE digital touch points.
It’s incredibly important that we create an experience that is frictionless, that is simple, that enables them to discover our offerings.
The complexity of the GE company and its vast business offerings required Vertic to re-imagine the role of the corporate website.
This re-imagination led to transforming GE.com from being a corporate catalog of all GE offerings, into an intelligent gateway to GE's wider digital ecosystem. For the new website to succeed, it was pivotal to create a simple and frictionless user experience. Moving away from long pages, complex menu structures and GE's own inside-out focused terminology, Vertic wanted to empower the user.
A new and unique search functionality serves as the centerpiece of the paradigm shift in user experience. It removes the need to navigate on GE's terms; instead allowing users to find information on their terms through contextualized search results and alignment with their information journeys. The search results experience enables completion of information journeys that would otherwise involve multiple different entry points on the site.
Through a proprietary insights framework, Vertic gained a deep understanding of GE stakeholders' digital behavior, including their preference of taxonomy, semantics, vocabulary as well as syntax when searching on Google. By powering the platform with AI and machine learning, GE.com garners further insights over time to become more intelligent and personalize the user experience.