Grofuse Redesign
UX/UI Design, Illustration, Wireframing & Prototyping
Grofuse is a digital marketing company in Derry/Londonderry - who work mainly with clients in the south of Ireland. They are a small team of highly skilled marketers, designers and developers. There main aim was to target their old websites pain points and have a complete website redesign - for a more sleek and modern look, whilst improving user experience. Grofuse felt that their old website was too overwhelming, had too much content and the moving imagery was distracting for users. If you don't have time to read the case study, see the wireframes below!
Project Type, Duration & Role
The project was basically a complete redesign of the companies website - taking old content and making it shorter and snappier whilst improving the user experience.
My role in the project was, the product designer. I worked alongside the project lead and also the development team.
The Process
For the initial user research, I conducted some usability testing with the team and some current clients of ours to understand the problems that were faced on the old website. During the synthesis phase - I was able to participate in affinity mapping with my project manager in order to analyse the pain points and determine what was the main priorities for this redesign.
From this, I moved on to conduct user flows to understand exactly where the users were coming into difficulty. This enabled me to come up with rough sketches to show how this could be improved through the new design that was proposed. This was then discussed with the wider team at Grofuse and showed how all the pain points had been addressed and resolved through the design process.
Research
Synthesis
Ideate
Prototype
Validate
Research
Initially, I met with the project lead and also the development team to perform some research on what the end goal of the redesign was, the revenue model for grofuse and looking at the traffic in terms of current google analytics and who exactly the target audience is. We then decided to perform usability testing with our current clients, who evidently are the target audience. People who require digital marketing or web design services - of all ages!
We outlined three tasks that users must perform and feed back on. These included:
1. You want to push your online presence and run ads with your business. You want to read about the services that Grofuse offer currently. Can you show us what you would do to find this information?
2. Now that you have found the information that you wanted to locate, you want to get in touch with us easily by a phone call or email. How would you do this?
3. A big part of your influence to choose Grofuse to help you with digital marketing is success stories. Can you show me where you would find some testimonials, clients feedback or any statistics that would drive you to choosing the company?
Synthesis
After we had the information from our users - the team began to break this down and understand what the main categories were. Users wanted to be drawn to Grofuse, be able to read about services and get in contact easily. Over a video call (damn covid!) we began to card sort on the project managers white board that we could all see.
This enabled us to prioritise the elements within the process and focus on the most important aspects that would have the maximum benefits on the first release of the new website given the short timeline.
Main Problems
“I found it really hard to see all the services that you offer, I wasn't Aware that you also offered web design and software development. It was also hard to find the services page and the content was everywhere. ”
- Client
Based on the research that we had undertaken as a team and also the card sorting activity, we identified the main problems:
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Difficult to find information on the services that Grofuse offer
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Call to action button were not easy to find throughout the website
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Difficult to get a quotation for the type of service that the user requires
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Currently video backgrounds lagged on users screens
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Call us button was not working for Northern area codes
User Persona
To help communicate the information about users that had been derived from the research methods carried out, I created a provisional user persona in order to communicate with the wider team.
Ideate
I created user flows for steps that a typical users of the Gorufse website goes through in order to complete two common tasks.
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Read about the services that Grofuse offer
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Get in contact through call to action buttons
Working alongside the project manager, I highlighted the areas where users began to have pain points - which is our main focus through the redesign.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Based on the established pain points, the project manager asked me to produce multiple options to explore how we can address the pain points that had been identified. I spent a few hours sketches these on to paper roughly and it really got the process moving and ideas generating.
Validate
After the design had been produced - we sent a prototype to our clients and began to look at their interaction with it and how we had successfully addressed their pain points.
In conclusion, I think for the short time i had to produce the designs I had successfully targeted the pain points and resolved them. The project manager was delighted with the outcome and feedback from users was poisitive.
I found the timeline quite challenging, as I had only around 2 and a half weeks to gather research, extract it and turn this into a design for the development team. I was delighted that the team I was working with were so open and talkative with their points and it allowed me to develop skills in more ways that one.
Stay tuned for phase 2, where we add careers pages and blogs on the website!