Pearson global store redesign
Role
Content Strategist
Background
IBM was engaged by Pearson to create a global store where higher education students could purchase educational materials, digital and hard copy, with the minimum of friction.
Problem statement
We believe that the store's fragmented, country-specific architecture and print-first design prevents global scalability and creates inconsistent user experiences across markets.
Key issues
Poor search functionality because of a lack of metadata strategy.
Confusing taxonomy with hundreds of overly narrow categories, often leading to dead ends in user journeys and users getting to pages with no results.
The design surfaced a backend system that made no sense to the user. Most users only succeeded in buying books or software because they were given direct product links by their teachers.
Pearson wanted to transform the store into a student-friendly, browsable experience—one that clearly communicated product details and encouraged exploration, leading to increased purchases beyond the bare minimum required by reading lists.
Research and insights
A content audit found a lot of content was not wanted by users - such as blogs.
Data showed us that the top 100 titles accounted for the majority of sales, so we concentrated our efforts on those.
Testing with students helped us create a new tone of voice
What I did
Developed a content strategy that supported reusable, structured content (COPE – Create Once, Publish Everywhere) within a new CMS (Adobe AEM) integrated with a new product system (Hybris).
Designed and implemented content models for user-centred, platform-agnostic content types across the site.
Developed a new subject taxonomy and an adaptive information architecture that responded to users' geolocation, supporting both global consistency and local flexibility.
Created a metadata plan to improve product discoverability and search functionality.
Defined a content governance strategy to ensure long-term consistency and scalability.
Worked closely with the SEO and engineering teams to implement structured content within the CMS.
Developed a new tone of voice tailored to higher education students, and produced a supporting style guide.
Created navigational, transactional, and contextual copy as well as reusable content patterns to support consistency across the site.
Results
We showed Pearson how a large ecommerce site could be managed more effectively through several content strategies that hadn’t existed before:
content modelling, mapped to the CMS
content patterns
adaptive information architecture
See for yourself
Pearson’s global store (opens in a new window)