Marketplace Landing Page Redesign
More often than not a top of funnel project is going to be a priority for your business. How you work with Marketing to elevate the brand through storytelling, strong visual identity and UX design are absolutely critical to success.
Know your users, know the company goals but most of all, know your stakeholders when you undertake a brand project.
In a VC backed marketplace like Koru Kids, rarely is growth not going to be a priority. With high CAC (cost of customer acquisition) due to childcare being a high value purchase makes eyes on the landing page even more precious. In the pursuit of agility, growth and scaling up (largely in productising a hitherto ops heavy business) our marketing pages had suffered and our business in turn was starting to suffer.
It’s no secret childcare is broken. Families struggle to manage the financial burden of nursery and wrap-around care out of their taxed income, mothers of two or more children in particular are forced to face the reality that their careers are ‘more expensive’ than their childcare. Add in trouble with finding quality, vetted childcarers and the paperwork, HMRC wrangling and difficulties with payroll and you have the perfect storm. We’d made it our mission to create a world in which every family has the childcare they need to flourish. If we’re going to deliver on this vision, we needed our visual identity to better reflect our customers, service, mission and brand better.
Step 1:Understand the Brand
Even though we know our childcare service was delivering life changing experiences for our families, our look wasn’t able to capture what we’re building. Customers were coming away not just put off by the the clunky UI but were actively being obstructed from their goals of evaluating our value proposition (actually even understanding it), seeing the nannies available in their area and performing a “cost-benefit analysis”.
Selling the goal of converting more of your landing page traffic into sign ups is the easy part. I’ve repeatedly found the sticking point is aligning visual identity with brand and communicating a value proposition to users.
So what to do about it?
Get your Marketing team on board with an exploration into their territory — have them present to you what the brand, mission, vision and values are, how they know that they resonate with the target audience and give you a history of how the visual identity of the brand has evolved. Make sure to document what you learn and save all the materials in an accessible shared location.
Step 2: Investigate why the brand wasn’t translating into the visual identity
Once you’ve established what’s already known about and desired of the brand, share a plan of how you’ll translate it visually it doesn’t need to be long but it does need to lay out your key objectives and what you’ll be doing.
Our key objectives were to:
1. Explore the brand’s personality visually, then clearly define it.
2. Write a brand brief for product design to meet.
3. Redesign the landing page to communicate our value proposition to new families using the new brief.
Doing a brand personality framework allows you to envisage the brand like a person, so that I can create designs that connect with our users on an emotional level. Which is important because emotion is what drives decision-making.
Use a brand affinity exercise to help you evaluate which pieces of brand collateral, product or marketing campaigns have encapsulated the brand well and which came up short. Be the eternal toddler and keep asking why.
In a Brand-Product Workshop, our Brand Director explained that the colour palette, shapes, iconography and illustrations commonly in the industry felt naff and childlike which felt wrong for our brand, which after all is meant to appeal to parents not their kids.
We then had a post mortem of visual language that didn’t align to the brand. By appealing to the brand personality framework we were able to identify what they missed using this heuristic
- Breakdown what isn’t conveyed
- Itemise what is conveyed in opposition to the brand
- Suggest what might have worked instead
Much of our brand was defined in opposition to the traditional industry and as such we identified an opportunity to use some pre-work for a second session to unpick some hard requirements around pastels, blues and yellows which actually lay in their employment needing to feel modern, competent and urbane rather than an objection to the colours themselves.
Step 3: Explore visual identities to make the brand come alive
We captured the UI of brands in our industry along with mindfit brands in similarly daunting high commitment industries as well as industries that, like childcare, catered to intimate human needs and had a legacy of heavily stereotyped design and discussed what it was about their visual identities really hit the mark.
In the care services competitor audit:
Floating UI, non bounded blocks and fluid shapes brought a modern and human/natural feel to the UI. Gradients, pastels and light colour schemes reenforce this whilst truly unique brands had a strong set of cohesive illustrations that bring them to life.
Disruptors in Insurance, Banking, Holiday and Housing market:
Light minimal interfaces bring brightness and hope into the experience and allay the ‘weightiness’ of the decisions being made in these high value purchases
Disruptors in Dating
The use of bold colour, movement, interaction and multi-media defied the more dated stereotypes of the industry and set hearts racing with excitement.
Personal care & sex disruptors
Skin tones immediately marked brands out as ‘human’ and felt modern which we felt could also reflect the diversity of our family user base.
Step 4: Design to showcase brand
Whilst our focus was on bringing the brand to life in the visual identity, we didn’t neglect the UX and IA aspects of the project. Slapping a new UI on our existing Marketing page wasn’t going to reflect back the brand and appeal to our customers or overcome the reservations customers voiced about quality and effort to register after seeing the information displayed on our landing pages.
We started with a quick skeleton of what the page should say and removed the obstruction of our services, sign up and marketplace being hidden on multiple different pages by unifying our landing pages into one service agnostic landing page.
This required considerable investment in simplifying our navigation, greater interactivity to allow customers to delve into areas of interest without overwhelming them with information on our landing pages. By quantifying the outcomes we expected we were able to secure the necessary product design and engineering resource to make it a reality.
Low-fidelity sketches served to let us explore multiple avenues for displaying the value proposition and ‘getting out the way’ of users by fast-tracking them into product to achieve their goal — find vetted, quality childcare for their needs.
Rather than tell people what are service is the postcode exploration lets them see and experience it so reduces the information load.
Tip: Using a sharpie forces focus on the headline information and functionality.
Using storytelling and design to communicate better
We lacked humanity in how we were showcasing the product which was at odds with the deeply human service we provide. By using story telling and illustration we were able to bring the user journey and ultimately the value proposition to life. I’ve pulled out a couple of examples of how we redesigned content to allow users to interact with it at their own pace and to ease the cognitive load of reading a lot of information. Using Pablo Stanley’s Humaans library (and adapting it to add mini humaans!) we were able to get a cohesive set of illustrations to breathe a little life into the brand.
Communicating the Value Proposition (How we work)
Communicating the Value Proposition (What’s included?)
This graphic, despite it’s appearance, was actually really crucial in illustrating the value to customers of the service and only once they had stumbled across it, or been shown it in research was the penny (sorry) dropping about why the service is quite so revolutionary or why our service fee exists at all. Applying the new visual identity to it was a way to show the value of the new brand system to our internal stakeholders as well as our customers.
Final Concept
Our final concept brings in the flowing light backgrounds we’d admired in the insurance and housing industries and breaks up the horizontal blocks with overflowing panels that riff on the building blocks that make up the logo. The lighter palate both blends better so reduces the visually jarring experience of block colours as far apart on a colour wheel as possible, and softens the angular edges of the building blocks without losing this feature that was critical to the brand.
The logo itself has had a small alteration to free it up from the ‘K’ logo oval setting and reads easier without the repeated K. This gives it the more modern and urbane feel that the brand team The primary rose becomes a warm accent colour used against the skin tones and the use of photography, the ‘building blocks’ and cohesive illustration and iconography set pulls it together.
Throughout the content and skin tones used emphasise the humanity and diversity of our families and nannies alike and we bring the social proof points into the above the fold experience whilst letting users discover the service at their own pace — those who’re happy to get stuck in can parachute into the deep end with the new postcode exploration flow whilst those wanting to understand the service before looking at nannies can explore the interactive content blocks and manifesto as well as read a selection of reviews from real families.
If you fancy having a click-a-bout the prototype it’s got a few fun bells and whistles.
Otherwise scroll for the static mockup!
