What if users don't know what a product is? How can we clearly communicate the value of a complex product to users?
project duration
4 months at agency, launched
MY ROLES
UX/UI web strategy, content strategy, conversion optimization, form strategy
INFORMATION
full website build (20 pages) in B2B and real estate project management
At a glance
WHO?
Northspyre provides a software platform for real estate professionals that allows users to attain predictable outcomes on development, capitol and asset projects across real estate projects. Their team collaborates with a team of UX/web strategists, developers, visual designers, and SEO experts at New Breed Revenue.
WHAT?
We created a new website that defines what Northspyre's product is, who it's for and what information their users need to convert.
HOW?
Conducting user research and creation of wireframes, mockups, user flows, user journeys, content strategy, and design.
WHY?
To increase conversions and clear up objections in the sales process.
INTRODUCTION
With plans to launch a freemium/low cost version of the software in early 2022, Northspyre came to the New Breed team for a new website that communicates the value of their software. The New Breed team primarily relies upon inbound marketing methodology to inform all strategies.
With this site build, we followed the inbound marketing methodology to create a website that leaves no questions unanswered for users.
my role
I worked with Northspyre's CEO, marketing manager and a marketing associate. On my team's side, I worked with a project manager, my UX manager, senior UX strategists, visual designers, developers, copywriters, SEO experts, and a technical lead. For this project, I was the lead UX/UI and content strategist.
Project Goals
- Increase website traffic
- Clear up misconceptions about what Northspyre is and who it's for
- Establish conversion generating forms to centralize all leads
What I learned from the client...
"Most people who book a demo with us still do not know anything about what Northspyre does.""
I learned that since Northspyre was a complex product, many customers didn't know what it was even after reaching out for a demo. I learned more about how they were currently performing, where they ranked within their own industry, and did an audit of their existing website.
- Website traffic and organic leads are low
- Their sales were primarily outbound driven at around 90-95%, but they were trying to gravitate towards more inbound sales with the goal of 50/50% inbound/outbound in the next 12-18 months
- Common objects during the sales process included poor timing, pricing, and misunderstanding the product and its benefits
- Their customer base used similar softwares that were generally geared towards construction projects – however, these softwares were not made by real estate developers and so they weren't specific to real estate teams. Northspyre's product is the only industry specific product in the space
- More than three out of four real estate projects finish over-budget, failing to hit financial targets. Yet, existing solutions continue to focus on document and task management, not critical financial drivers
- Real estate development and the building industry is fragmented, so data to improve project delivery and procurement is siloed and fragmented across tens of thousands of individual companies
- Poor use of font hierarchy made it difficult to differentiate types of information
- Meeting plugin that makes users work for a demo rather than a simple form that's easy to use
- No mention of what problems Northspyre software is solving
- No filtering system for different resources
- Low effort interlinking strategy to resources and user-specific pages
- Blurry UI graphics
This information was helpful, as it helped form a better picture of what types of problems users might be running into. But I kept in mind that I am not the user, nor was the client the user. As an advocate for UX research, this did bring me closer to the internal initiative of evaluating my team's UX maturity and writing a user research playbook for future integrations into our process. Want to hear more about this? Let's chat!
Strategy and inbound methodology
- Who is Northspyre for?
- What types of challenges do each of these unique users face?
- How does Northspyre software solve those challenges?
- What are the results of using Northspyre?
Sitemap
Since the client let us know that several customers told them they didn't know who Northspyre was for, we decided to spell it out clearly in the navigation with user specific pages under Who We Serve and further segment by company type and user.
Wireframing and content strategy
After that, I sketched out lo-fi wireframes and moved these into Sketch, making changes along the way. I reviewed them with my UX manager and after making revisions, I presented them to the client and did three more rounds of revisions. I made ten total wireframes, one for each page template that would be used in the final site, and even though there were eight scoped, I threw in two extra to be fully explain my strategy.
USER SPECIFIC PAGES
With user specific pages, we addressed unique challenges that each user might face and even what challenges their team as a whole faces. By addressing pain points, our content strategy was geared towards highlighting how Northspyre software solves for problems specifically for the user.
RESULTS BASED CONTENT
Along with turning previously gated PDF-only case studies into actual resource webpages, we showed exactly how to get desired results using Northspyre at every stage of the real estate project process.
This was the strategy for each specific user, and for each type of team these users would typically be on. The interlinking strategy was to bring users to the feature-specific page if they wanted to learn more.
TRUST BUILDING CONTENT
To build trust with Northspyre users, we leveraged logos of clients using their software as well as using
statistics that show effectivity.
According to the inbound methodology, sharing as much information that can be tailored to customers as possible helps build trust. I paired user-specific challenges to direct solutions to these challenges build trust with users.
EXPLAINING EXACTLY WHAT NORTHSPYRE IS
Since we received feedback that users didn't know what Northspyre was, we made sure that every detail of the software's features were ironed out clearly.
With sections that acknowledged the potential questions users might have like "Why Automate?" information that communicates the unique value of the software and examples from case studies allows users to see it in action and demystifies it.
Visual Design
BEFORE
CLEAR CONTENT SECTIONS
We took a high contrast approach and utilized whitespace and negative space to designate separate blocks of content.
The different sharp shapes reflected the different fragments and foundations of the real estate project management process.
COLOR FOR CLICKS
Pops of color was used to draw users to take action on buttons in active and hover states and on other UI elements like tabs. We used gradients to direct users further down the page to read more content.
Color was also emphasized on key call to action content sections.
FONT HIERARCHY
In my original site audit, I flagged that the lack of a font hierarchy made it difficult to know what was the most important information for the user to know.
With a proper font hierarchy and headline styles, this could be less confusing and scannable. This way, complex information can be communicated right away and wouldn't require the user to focus like reading a book.
Challenges
CONDUCTING USEFUL RESEARCH
Since the information we moved forward with primarily came from the client, not the users, it's difficult to validate the outcome of the website build. Most of the team had direct information from their users due to their involvement in the sales process, but that alone could create a strong change in their behaviors since it wasn't a neutral environment. This led to me to thinking all about exactly how important it is to involve users in our process. I started wondering..
Were we asking the right questions? What if our users needed different information to convert? What are the right problems? Are we even solving any of them?
What content would our copywriter have written if we had actual documentation of user needs, frustrations and goals?
What research I would have conducted
Field studies! Since real estate projects can take anywhere from months to years, it would be useful to catalog frustrations, thoughts, feelings and tasks over a period of time in a natural environment.
Card sorting or tree testing to understand if our navigation structure and content block order per page matched up with the way users actually categorized and organized them.
Post-launch, a peek into how analytics are doing (top pageviews, clickstream analysis, highest performing resources) would help to reorganize content according to user priority.
Usability testing! Since we did not test our designs, it would have been useful to see where we could have made tweaks and adjustments for better user experience.
TIMELINE SHIFTS
The engagement started with only 10 website pages scoped, and this later changed to 20 pages. Doubling their site, our client was prepared to do a partial launch, with only significant pages going live and others unpublished until the full push.
While this required a shuffling of resources, my team was ready with all hands on deck to ship this out! However, this required us internally to make large timeline shifts and manage internal resources to accommodate our client. As the lead strategist, as bugs came up through the partial launch, I supported my team by redirecting developers to original wireframes. In turn, they supported me with their quick fixes!
To learn more on how I identified gaps in my team's UX process and advocated for user research, contact me here.
Thanks for reading and thanks to the Northspyre team and the New Breed team for all the support on this project!