Timken offers design engineers a series of digital tools to define and refine a product to a very specific set of criteria and specifications. These tools had become dated, difficult to use, lacking brand trust, and had an inconsistent look & feel between each tool, contributing to the poor user experience.  

The digital tools themselves needed a new home, as a subsite or microsite experience, to better support them as a collection of useful tools and information for design engineers. Catering to a broad audience of seasoned experts and industry newcomers, the site needed to be approachable for everyone.

About Timken

The Timken Company is a $5.3B global industrial leader known for manufacturing bearings, gear drives, couplings, industrial belts, chains, and related power transmission products and services. 

The 10 unique digital tools included preexisting, new, and more to come — so the solution required deep user and industry research, strategy, and future proofing. I led my team to uncover the business requirements and experience goals through hands-on workshops with industry experts. 

The site experience needed to be defined from the ground up, with a completely blank canvas. It needed to stand out from the Timken corporate brand experience as something special and unique for design engineers, while also respecting complementing the Timken brand — for trust and brand equity.

The opportunity was clear — create a site that interweaves these tools together seamlessly, utilizing a design system that emphasizes usability and can effortlessly speed up repetitive and highly detailed tasks.

I led my team to define the information architecture, user experience and visual designs, generating a reusable design system with accompanying visual assets and icon library.

We focussed heavily on the newcomer audience, creating a multistep guided help section, to ensure a continually expanding user-base and smooth adoption of the tools for all users. 

With the new site launch, traffic was monitored as it quickly gained momentum and user adoption, generating powerful brand exposure to design engineer professionals in a highly competitive market.

I led my team to conduct user testing to get first-hand feedback from users. Valuable input was captured and precision refinements were executed to further optimize the user experience.

These tools quickly integrated with the day to day tasks of the target audience, which continues to expand primarily by word of mouth. Timken invested in multiple additional phases, rolling out more tools, features and functions to better serve the newly captivated audience.