As the world’s largest internet domain registrar and web hosting company, GoDaddy has become synonymous with hosting. These days, though, GoDaddy aspires to be more than the first stop on a customer’s journey.
They’re working on a suite of products to keep their 14+ million customers in the GoDaddy ecosystem throughout every stage—from buying the domain to designing and launching a complete website.
These web-building products fall under an umbrella called GoCentral. The GoCentral team—one part of the company’s 5,000 employees—knew that to build a whole new line of products in a competitive space, they’d need a best-in-class product design process. That’s why they turned to InVision Enterprise.
Design-driven project management for all
Josh Berk is the senior UX manager at GoDaddy, and he says that InVision plays a crucial role at every stage of a project, for nearly every team.
“I live in InVision for everything,” Berk says. “But it’s not just me. Product managers use InVision to give feedback and review designs, we have copywriters going in to leave their feedback, and we have engineers using the Inspect tool to get pixel-perfect style specifications.”
Design and development work better together
Product Manager Rachel Beneke relies on InVision Enterprise to streamline the workflow between design and development.
“In the past, we’d put static screenshots in our ticketing system. Any time things changed, it updated and the developers didn’t know it updated. There was this constant stream of history changes and updating the ticket.”
With InVision’s JIRA integration, that’s changed. Designers now link to the prototypes directly in the tickets, which update in real time to reflect the latest design. And with the Inspect tool, developers can now gather assets directly from the prototype.
Building products faster through better collaboration
By using InVision Enterprise to streamline collaboration, the GoDaddy team says design and development are faster and more efficient.
“We used to have so many different versions of designs in so many different locations,” says Anne Kinahan, a UX engineer at GoDaddy. “I’d do work and then find out later that I was working from an outdated design and I’d have to go back and recode it. It was very frustrating. Engineering resources were being wasted. Now we use InVision as a single source of truth. It’s wonderful.”
“We used to have so many different versions in so many locations. Now we use InVision as a single source of truth. It’s wonderful.”
For Berk, that’s led to a much shorter design cycle. “It’s drastically minimized our design and feedback loop,” Berk says. “There used to be a lot of back-and-forth, redlining, discussions, and meetings. Now there’s just one easy spot to check and the discussions can happen real time, on the design.”
Keeping design awesome at scale
As a company grows, maintaining a consistent design culture—and keeping everybody on the same page—becomes a challenge. To gain transparency into the work of designers share across the country, GoDaddy uses InVision Enterprise as the central hub for collaboration.
“Even though we’re in different time zones, InVision is that common thread that everybody can communicate through.”
Another technique they use is prototyping their products into the larger GoDaddy ecosystem to check for consistency across products. “We now have tests where users go through InVision prototypes and follow the navigation to simulate what it would be like clicking around and going from app to app,” Berk says.
Streamlining design with Craft
Craft, InVision’s suite of plugins for Sketch and Photoshop, has been critical in keeping design consistent and efficient at GoDaddy.
“Craft has completely refactored how we design,” Berk says. “We use it to create a kind of design library of predefined elements. This includes toggles, inputs, text, colors, and all these elements that are common GoDaddy patterns. We put it in Library and when we go to a page we just drop those onto the canvas.”
“That’s really helped in streamlining the design process and making that more efficient.”
Unlimited creativity with Boards
Berk says research has been crucial in building out products for GoCentral, and the tool they use most is Boards.
Boards is a popular InVision feature that provides users with a limitless canvas for quickly uploading, organizing, and sharing material, including fonts, colors, copy, and screenshots.
“Whenever we’re working on a new feature, we’ll go out and grab screenshots of other best practices, what competitors do, and put a Board together,” he says. “Then we’ll start brainstorming ideas on paper and get those sketches onto the Board as well. This allows the whole team to quickly talk about what we’re thinking.”
Building products the right way
According to Berk, InVision Enterprise has done more than just streamline the design process—it’s helped the team build products the right way.
“There was a time when we were more siloed. We’d toss a design over the wall and wait for it to get built,’” Berk says. “But we heard feedback from engineering and wanted to get to a more collaborative state, where they felt part of the design. InVision helped in that.”
Want to build better products, faster and more collaboratively? Learn about InVision Enterprise.
by Ben Goldman
Ben is a Content Strategist at InVision. Before InVision, he co-founded the local news startup Blockfeed and served as a marketing consultant for early stage startups. In his free time, he writes sci-fi, daydreams about future technology, and makes chocolate chip pancakes for his wife and two kids.
