hello@alexhawthorne.com
For Belden, ongoing since 2025,
as a UX/UI designer and project manager.
With the marketing team, digital marketing team,
events & experiences team, corporate communications team,
social media team, customer experience team, and product experts.
This project began when I was asked to show Belden's digital marketing team how to create a unified, auto-updating space for the team's designs in Figma. This was not paid work, I was meeting with someone from the team and they asked me, I just followed up on it. After this though, I was formally hired as a UX/UI designer, to audit their digital marketing assets: email, newsletter, landing page, and form templates.
Belden, a 124-year old company, was now to start prioritizing the digital experience in their overall customer experience. They wanted to prioritize digital lead-generation campaigns for their marketing efforts, too. Recently, they had actually received a few complaints from users about their forms, landing pages, and emails. I was to identify every area for improvement that I could, and to create a feasible process for implementing these improvements.
Audit findings:
Opportunities for improving the user experience of emails, newsletters, landing pages, and forms ranged from fixing broken or inaccessible components, to implementing more functional components and consistent styles across all digital channels.
I presented all of my findings, and I updated existing elements, components and styles to create an optimal user experience. On the style side, this was done as part of an ongoing internal initiative, "One Belden," and brought their digital marketing tools into alignment with the rest of Belden's redesigned branding and design language.
This digital collateral was all being built on a drag-and-drop platform. They would need to use custom code to doing anything beyond text or images, and the digital marketing team was not prepared to build with custom code at scale. I created an implementation guide, where team members could pick from any of the new custom elements/components/styles, update copy and links wherever necessary, and then copy/paste. I made a video tutorial to show the team how to use this guide, then advocated for its use in a series of Q&A meetings, presentations, and conversations. Quickly, I saw other people using the custom elements across multiple new pages.
Launching the next iteration of Belden's landing pages:
After this, I was asked to stay and serve as a designer and project manager for new landing page requests, working on the digital marketing team for stakeholders from every continent (except, of course, Antarctica). What has followed since:
I designed and developed over 40 distinct landing pages.
Pages for a wide array of purposes and audiences, from different product descriptions, to new case studies, to conference signups, and many more.
As time went on, new use cases required me to create and update the design system, style guide, implementation guide, and landing page templates with new styles, elements, components, and layouts.
Before
Pages layouts were either repetitive and boring (nothing but paragraphs of text and occasional stock images), or inconsistent in a confusing manner.
Forms used small text, too-tight spacing, and look outdated. Forms were also unresponsive (relative to screen size) and could cause layout issues.
After
Mobile-first design to design for more target users as they actually engage with Belden's offerings.
Forms are now clear, responsive, and branded.
Impact:
Before (1-month avg.):
591,421 visitors
430 resulting sales/deals
After (1-month avg.):
697,139 visitors
1,265 resulting sales/deals
Results:
Visitors per month have gone up by approx. 17.88% since the new pages were launched, but sales/deals per month by these visitors have increased by approx. 194.19%.
"…have really loved seeing the evolution of the designs compared to where we started. It’s brilliant. We’ve been loving how the campaign pages are turning out and have heard a lot of great feedback from stakeholders on the new modules you’ve built… I’ve been very impressed with the landing pages you’re producing and how well you collaborate with such a wide variety of stakeholders."
– Graeme Haase, manager, campaign orchestration at Belden