Dolby Laboratories

On a small team at Valtech, I re-designed Dolby.com's consumer and professional websites, distilling them into twelve annotated templates still in-use by Dolby today.

Client
Dolby Laboratories
Team
Valtech
Role
Technical Content Strategist

Challenge

At the end of 2020, Dolby Labs had a bit of a problem. It had been years since their last redesign, and in that time they had amassed a CMS of thousands of pages of complex, seemingly disparate content they couldn't possibly update themselves. Within that collection, Dolby was maintaining what were effectively two separate websites: one for casual consumers, and one for technical folks.

Since the scale of this was beyond their scope, Dolby Labs recruited Valtech to re-organize and migrate all of their domains to the Sitecore engine.

Task

As a consultant at Valtech, I became the Lead Content Strategist on the Dolby Labs re-design with a 2 week deadline to:

  • Audit the Dolby Labs consumer AND technical websites, and propose up to 12 page types to classify its thousands of web pages.
  • Onboard to Sitecore's CMS, and familiarize myself with hundreds of design components built specifically for Dolby Labs by developers.
  • Build interactive prototypes of the 12 proposed page types in Sitecore, and work with developers to modify components as needed.
  • Pitch this vision for Dolby.com to their marketing leadership, gain their buy-in, and lay out a long-term plan for migrating to Sitecore.

Conferring with my product manager via Teams, I held daily stand-ups with her and our front-end engineering lead, ensuring I had access to the styling behind our design components, and approval for my creative direction.

The legacy Dolby.com home page, circa Jan 2020.

Action

With the relatively short timeframe allotted to me (in the middle of May 2020), I quickly executed on a few parallel workstreams: 

  • On a Zoom call with our engineering lead, I exported Dolby Labs' domain sitemaps from their proprietary CMS, including all available metadata.
  • With the branching of Dolby's consumer and technical webpages clearly visualized for me, I discerned 10-12 buckets I could categorize them into.
  • After winning approval for these 12 page "archetypes," I built them in the Sitecore CMS, experimenting with a full library of branded components.
  • I created variations for each of these 12 templates, and annotated them from top-to-bottom for future copywriters and front-end devs to maintain.

Upon reaching a consensus internally, I worked tirelessly with our front-end devs to launch a fully-functional demo of these 12 page archetypes on Sitecore. As needed, I requested new components, or modified existing ones, to achieve our unified vision.

An early manifest for the proposed "Setup Tutorial" page type.

Results

I pitched our set of 12 page templates, from cinematic landing pages to Dolby Atmos technical specs, and won approval from the Dolby Labs marketing team.

  • We migrated Dolby Labs, and converted thousands of webpages to fit my 12 page templates, within the next 3 months.
  • My visual designs, layouts, and themes have been retained and applied by Dolby Labs for over 4 years and counting.
  • Dolby Labs has automated the launch of new domains for developers, like Dolby.io, and Dolby Experential for casual fans.
Our finalized, annotated page template for "Dolby Technology".An example of lesson from our MVP on using the Cellpose plugin for cell segmentation.
Our final, annotated demo of the "Dolby Technologies" page for casual fans.

Takeaway

Given the right vantage point, even an immense enterprise-grade domain like Dolby Labs can be deconstructed. Auditing under tight constraints forces you to look past the fluff and see the function of a web page for what it is. Once you have a shared vision for a redesign, you can work wonders within a single sprint.

Interested in working together? Get in touch today.

As human beings of the Digital Age, we're all teeming with thoughts and ideas. I enjoy bridging the gaps between them.