neednexus 1.0
The first web presence for a B2B professional service solutions platform to promote their service and convert users into prospective clients.
Project Type
Client Project
Team
Myself
Marketing Manager
Copywriter
Web Developer
My Role
Product Manager
Wireframing
Prototyping
Tools
Figma
Duration
2 Months (2021)
OVERVIEW
Project Context
Neednexus is a B2B solutions platform that helps companies engage in disciplined innovation and identify new market opportunities by addressing unmet user needs.
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In 2021, neednexus was invited to speak at AWS Re:Invent, and the engagement was viewed as a valuable opportunity to attract customers and capture additional market share. However, without an established web presence or explanation of service offerings, neednexus risked missing out on many prospective customers and wasting the promotional opportunity.
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So, neednexus reached out to me to design a webpage that would improve their external marketing efforts and attract a larger share of the client base.
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Note: The name of the project has been changed to maintain client’s anonymity.
Design Process
This project required a very short timeframe and a firm deployment deadline, so I opted to skip user research in order to leave enough time for iteration and deployment.
KICKOFF
Let's talk about the branding.
In the design brief, the client requested that the webpage match their parent company’s branding guidelines.
Colour Scheme
RESEARCH
Checking Out the Competition
I conducted an audit of 5 competitors’ websites or webpages. I examined each website for their presentation of services, pages, methodology, and insights; and noted the design choices made for each. I also noted the layout, navigability, and “density” of each webpage to identify any design trends.
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Identifying mental models was important in helping me understand what users expect to see in a client-facing webpage so that our webpage would resemble features that users have seen before and allow for a consistent user journey.
ANALYSE & DEFINE
The Project Vision
The professional services and solutions market is highly active and saturated, so any opportunity to promote oneself and capture prospective customers must be maximised. neednexus needs a website that will present their service offerings, methodologies, insights, and credibility in a single digestable page.
IDEATE
Coming up with webpage options.
I sketched some paper wireframes where I explored options for the layout of the homepage. I selected my favourite elements and created a cleaner screen to show the client.
The Solution
I designed a webpage that included 2 quotes from neednexus leadership, a brief introduction to the platform and overview of their approach, a list of team members, and a selection of relevant insights and articles.
TEST
Even in the timecrunch, I made time for testing.
I prepared an informal usability test to gather feedback about the design. I surveyed employees of different seniority levels and roles within the client’s organization about their immediate impressions navigating through the webpage.
Given that neednexus was a relatively new endeavour within the organization, most of my client’s employees were relatively uninformed about the platform, providing me with an unbiased slate of users on which to test my design.
Order of Operations
Users were thrown off by the quote section immediately below the fold ; users suggested introducing the neednexus methodology first, followed by a quote from the platform leader to reinforce neednexus’ ethos.
Text Alignment
Users noted that the variations between centered and left-aligned text in different sections was distracting.
Use of Colour
Users appreciated that the webpage’s colours and typography were consistent with the parent company’s branding, but found the bright blue quote section overwhelming.
PROTOTYPE
Time to create the final prototype, and fast!
I adjusted the order of sections, putting the methodology section immediately below the fold, and using the 2 quote sections to break up the text-heavy webpage. I also left-aligned all text and I opted for a more modest use of the branding colours — applying the bright blue only to the most important word in each section header. Concurrently, the client revised the webpage text copy, so I applied the finalised text to the prototype.
DEPLOY
3, 2, 1, Launch!
After presenting the hi-fi prototype and receiving approval from the client, I handed the designs off to the team's web developer who deployed the webpage in AEM. Concurrently, I worked with the client’s marketing team to define SEO metatags and KPI metrics to evaluate the success of the webpage.
The neednexus webpage was officially published 2 weeks before AWS, allowing neednexus to generate organic and inorganic traffic ahead of the conference.
Takeaways
The client and I undertook this project with the understanding that we were facing a tight timeframe and a tangible deadline. Ideally, I would have conducted user research before the ideating stage in order to understand the pain points of neednexus’ prospective clients and inform the user journey. Additionally, I would have conducted a more formal usability test with subjects outside of the client’s organization.
Nevertheless, neednexus was extremely satisfied with the final webpage design, and noted the cross-functional collaboration across design, marketing, and web engineering. They even asked me to return to design a complete website that would replace this neednexus webpage. Click the button below to read that case study.