Database Engine: Responsive web platform

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The challenge

A database engine site and community. It doesn't sound complicated enough? Well, the previous site was in Korean, and had around 1000 pages that nobody knew and understood. It was virtually impossible to understand how they were connected to one another, but still the very technical content from them needed to be preserved and propagated on the new platform, because, even though useful, nobody was able to actually use and find that information.

The new platform had to be that, plus:

- speak directly to the very specific developers that are able to contribute to the development of a complex, fully-featured, open source database engine and get them involved and contributing;

- get the managers in search of a good and free database engine favor this product.

The solution

Together in workshops with the product owner and lead developer of the engine, the only people that actually understood (most of) the product and its features, we managed to find the voice of the product, the way it should communicate with its very specific and technical target users, the style and visual that doesn't make it fall under the "not serious enough" tag but allows it to get closer to the people, giving them installation guides, download elements, readme files and manuals, multiple versions with multiple licensing, contribution suggestions, descriptions of features and patches, etc, in a simplified, guided journey.

So, what happened?

After launching the new platform, a noticeable increase in use and reach was observed, low bounce rates and great conversion. Heatmaps showed us the performance of our pages and specific download areas in the platform, supporting the design and UX decisions with solid data.

What is best: people actually started using it, enjoying the technical and well-documented blog articles, starting to contribute and get in touch with the core dev team (which was a much desired first), increasing dramatically the number of downloads for the engine and its drivers and tools. Great feedback started to come our way, helping us learn more about what they needed and allowing us to optimize.