Challenge
Accessibility issues, over-productized page, a million colors, campaign imagery divorced from the organic audience… opportunity abounds, but how to bring shape to such a confused space? First, focus on distilling goal: convert more prospects in the consideration phase to active users. The bulk of this project was spent wading through a new and complex org—understanding previous tests and outcomes, defining success, acquainting myself with the current design systems at play, and ensuring I had the right review and approvals process in place to lock in alignment.
Directions abound
We started from a visual expression that was really loud with conflicting color stories that didn’t reflect a future facing brand. There were several systems available to us to pull from design-wise, but none through our current code base. Each system was possible, but it’s wasn’t that it was the right choice.
Decision points
I made the choice to pull inspiration from the adobe.com homepage at the time, drawing on a glassy card effect (I know, I know. In my defense, this was pre-Apple glass) and pulling in bright colors from the Express product to ensure a visual through line.
Despite many a prototype in Webflow of more experimental motion and interaction patterns, we landed on a direction that the principal PM at the helm was very set on. While there were concessions made on my end in this first project, I was there not to win a battle but to win a war of driving strategy instead of just responding to PRDs.
Results
Despite making some design concessions, this test was a win. During the test window it drive a 3.96% increase in app referral (+75k per quarter), 3.4% increase in monthly active users (+22k monthly), 7.15% increase in first time authenticators in app, and a 1.39% increase in exports. For non-internal folk, the takeaway is that the test drove increases not only in CTA clicks and first time product sign in, but also drove down funnel metric improvements.
What now?
We needed to keep moving through the roadmap, but this work was far from done. Over the next year, I built PM, eng, and core product relationships trying to understand what was blocking us from evolution technically (and visually).
Once I finally had a grasp on the team, I started planning vision sprint work across my team and the content designers. We revved on what the future of the surface could look like and pushed on concepts that tried new visual expression and narrative storytelling. We landed somewhere visually that was influenced by work happening by a central redesign effort heavily influenced by our expertise in our users and product.
Testing into the future
Now that we had full time engagement from content partners, we were seeing a quality multiplier on the work. We built out a test on the homepage that would help us test into this visual direction. We simplified the complex hero and used minimal design changes to begin testing into the concept.
More to come on this case study!
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