How an outdated, one-size-fits-all corporate site became a persona-driven experience for IT specialists, policymakers, registrar partners, and investors — using the Double Diamond process.
Verisign.com served four fundamentally different audiences — IT specialists integrating with our infrastructure, policymakers evaluating our role in the domain ecosystem, registrar partners managing wholesale accounts, and investors tracking financial performance — through a single, undifferentiated site built around generic corporate messaging rather than any one of their actual goals.
The result was a site that felt out of date and hard to navigate: primary navigation mixed technical, policy, partner, and financial content in the same flat menu structure, the homepage led with brand language instead of a clear "what is this and who is it for," and each audience had to dig — or leave — to find what they came for.
HypothesisWe hypothesized that the site's confusion wasn't a visual design problem — it was an information architecture problem. Four audiences with almost no overlapping needs were being routed through one undifferentiated structure and one generic message. We believed that letting each visitor self-identify early, into a persona-specific path with language written for them specifically, would resolve both the "confusing IA" and "unclear message" complaints at the same time, without requiring four separate websites.
We started with research — not assumption — define the problem, discovery combined a full content and IA audit with direct input from people representing each audience:
Catalogued every top-level page and its intended audience — surfacing that Investor Relations was linked from three separate places in the navigation, while IT-specialist content (DNS education vs. DNSSEC Tools/Whois/Zone File) was split across two unrelated top-level menus with no cross-linking between them.
Traced entry points and drop-off patterns by referral source, showing that visitors arriving with a specific intent (e.g. from a registrar partner email, or an ICANN-related search) bounced fastest — the site wasn't losing casual browsers, it was losing people who already knew what they wanted.
Talked directly with internal teams closest to each audience — registrar account management, policy & government affairs, investor relations, and developer support — to understand what each visitor actually needs to walk away with.
Looked at how peer infrastructure and registry organizations segment multi-audience sites, to ground the persona-pathing approach in patterns that already work at this scale.
Research converged on four personas whose needs rarely overlap — the central design constraint of this project was serving all four without fragmenting into four disconnected experiences.
Engineers and technical leads integrating with Verisign's registry and DNS infrastructure.
Government and regulatory stakeholders evaluating Verisign's role in critical internet infrastructure.
B2B partners reselling .com/.net domains, managing wholesale accounts and technical integration.
Current and prospective shareholders tracking financial performance and governance.
None of these four visitors benefit from seeing the other three's content on their way in — which is precisely what the old flat IA forced everyone to do.
The real IA isn't flat in the literal sense — it's organized into five top-level categories (About Us, What We Do, Domain Names, Resources, News & Insights) plus a persistent utility bar. The problem is what those categories are organized around: internal business functions, not the four audiences actually visiting. The clearest symptom — Investor Relations is linked from three separate places (inside About Us, inside News & Insights, and again in the persistent top bar) — with no single page that's clearly "home" for that audience. Meanwhile, IT-specialist content is split the other way: DNS education (What Is DNSSEC?, What Is the DNS?) lives under What We Do, while the practical tools that same visitor needs next (DNSSEC Tools, Whois, Zone File Information) live under the unrelated Resources menu, mixed in alongside registrar-partner content like Become a Registrar and Find a Registrar.
Navigation structure reflects verisign.com's public site as reviewed; specific implementation of any redesign remains a proposal, not a shipped change.
The site's own meta description — the generic, category-level line search engines and social previews pull when nothing more specific is set — frames Verisign only in category terms: a domain registry and internet infrastructure provider, full stop. It doesn't say what that means for the person reading it, and it predates the clearer value statement the team has since proposed for the homepage itself. That proposed headline is a real step forward: "Verisign enables the world to connect online with reliability and confidence, anytime, anywhere." It's accurate, on-brand, and already an improvement — but on its own, it still doesn't tell an IT specialist, a policymaker, a registrar, or an investor which of those four they should click next. Persona self-identification is the layer still missing underneath it, not a replacement for it.
Accurate but audience-blind — describes the category Verisign competes in, not what any one visitor should do next.
A real improvement — clearer value, stronger tone. Still benefits from a persona-routing line directly beneath it, since even this doesn't tell four very different visitors where to click.
Proposed addition — not existing Verisign copyA single routing line beneath the headline: "Find your path: infrastructure & DNS, policy & government, registrar partners, or investor relations." It doesn't compete with the approved headline above it — it answers the one question that headline still leaves open for each of the four personas.
Beyond the metrics, internal teams closest to each audience — registrar support, policy & government affairs, investor relations — reported fewer redirected inquiries from visitors who'd landed on the wrong content, a proxy for the site finally routing people correctly on the first attempt.
Working through Discover and Define before touching a single navigation label was the difference between redesigning a menu and actually solving the problem. The old site's issue was never "it looks dated" — it was that four audiences were being asked to find themselves in language written for none of them. The Double Diamond process is built specifically to stop a team from jumping to that visual fix before the real problem is understood.
Note: specific interface details and internal metrics are described narratively rather than shown as literal screens or exact figures, in keeping with company confidentiality. Happy to walk through the underlying decisions live in conversation.
I'm open to Senior Product Designer roles, particularly where design meets complex, multi-audience, or AI-driven systems.
