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Marketing for a new product

Background

My responsibility

I was hired as the first employee at Nodabl to design the product (a web application) from scratch and influence the product decisions. As the only designer, I also supplied the marketing materials for the public website and social media assets.

Note: Logo, branding, copy, and illustrations were not created by me. I worked with a brand designer to ensure the public website and product were aligned with the brand. An illustrator was also contracted to ensure the product would feel approachable and motivational.

Problem to solve

In the first year of a startup, time is restricted and the ‘delightful moments’ that improve user experiences generally get de-prioritised as it is more important that the product actually works. The marketing site was in general a lower priority to the web application. With this understanding, I wanted to balance the workload for engineers so that it would be a functional marketing website but also leverage design to convey our mission.

In short, I wanted to make a big impact with little effort for everyone.

My process

All marketing designs were completed with ensuring front-end development would be straightforward and design complexity kept to a minimum. I designed the web application and marketing site so that it shared the same CSS, spacing between components were consistent, and illustrations were limited so it would be easier to display on different breakpoints.

Through user research, the concept of managing and tracking your professional growth was new to a lot of people. We then wanted to ensure the message of the product and what it did. It was decided that this was most easily communicated through the stylised screenshots of the product.

What I learned

  • Better understanding of Bootstrap framework
  • To remember to reference the brand guidelines when you’re stuck on ideas
  • How to better collaborate with an illustrator. It was my first time I personally worked with an illustrator and had to provide guidance on colours and themes
  • How to convey to someone what Nodabl is after 10 months working on the product

Designs

About Nodabl

Nodabl is a startup founded in January 2019. The mission of the product is to enable every person to maximise their professional potential. To do that, we created tools for people to take control of their own professional growth.

Communicating the product features

As of October 2019, the product features went through many rounds of design and testing. For the public release, stylised product images were created to help communicate the core features.

Step 1: Set Goals

Users select competencies they want to work on as their goal.

Step 2: Track progress

To make progress towards improving on that competency chosen for their goal, users needed to record activities to track what they had done.

Step 3: Get Feedback

Users could request feedback on the activities they add from people that can inform them of their progress.

Step 4: Measure growth

At the end of each goal, a self-assessment was presented to users to measure their confidence and knowledge & ability in the competency. Reports were available for users to review their growth and how they are tracking towards their goals.

Nodabl.co – the public facing website

Home

Designed a mobile responsive website which was launched May 2019 then redesigned in October 2019. Main changes included updates to the features as well as simplifying the look and feel to communicate a more deliberate and focused design (to support Nodabl’s brand). The hero illustration was removed and replaced with decorative illustrations so that the value proposition of Nodabl could be read with less distraction.

Updated design launched on October 2019

Initial design of website launched on May 2019

About us

Resources

Preloader

I created an animation of the Nodabl logo using only CSS for the Nodabl preloader.

Illustrations

Use of illustrations were included in the product to make the product feel more approachable and fun.

Find out more about the 10 months of creating Nodabl or the most recent design iteration.

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Material Design for Android app

Customer need

The SimplePractice Android app needed an overhaul to create an Android specific experience for our customers. The engineers in the mobile team had been working for 5 years without a dedicated designer, and created an experience based on best practices while mostly referencing iOS patterns. Considering the resources available, the app worked well. But as SimplePractice’s web experience was constantly improving and features were being implemented, the mobile experience needed more design patterns to cater to those needs.

I designed the Android app based on material design system but also used existing patterns in the app to alleviate the burden of forcing our customers to learn a new app.

The following are the core screens which contain all the components used throughout the app.

Scheduling and managing appointments

The calendar is the most used screen by customers. I wanted to ensure the most important information was clearly displayed as clinicians may only have a few minutes between sessions to check their schedule.

Two FAB buttons were used which breaks the material design recommendations (should be one), but the use case to allow customers to quickly decline or accept appointments was a justified reason to implement it.

Clients and their contacts

As clinicians may have hundreds of clients, a filtering system was included for quicker access to specific clients or contacts.

Client detail

The client detail screen is slightly more unique as clients are the centre of a clinician’s practice. To provide the importance of a client and remind which client is being viewed, the header area is enlarged to give that focus.

Notes to track progress

Including notes is vital to a clinician’s role to track their client’s progress. Optimising the way forms are viewed, and the ease of use of text fields and selectors provides a lot of value for our customers.

Reminders

Reminders are another key screen for a clinician to keep their practice on track.

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Responsive Website for Learnvest Editorial

Problem to solve

  • Learnvest’s editorial site was not optimised for mobile which was affecting the rankings within search engine results.
  • Although statistics informed us on high volumes when articles were promoted via other channels, there was very low recirculation i.e. users often did not continue to read other content

Discovery and research

Started with an audit
Reviewed the type of articles and the tone of voice, as well as understand the target audience. I also research sites of our competitors or with similar content, and a comparative analysis of other editorial sites.
View PDF – Audit of LV Content

Existing design had a navigation which was not self-explanatory and three types of article pages which was resolved into one for consistency

Existing sitemap
Sitemap of the navigation and categories – tags were also used but not included in sitemap.

Proposed Strategy

Started with an overall goal for the editorial content site so that is tied to the company’s mission statement



Resolving the Information Architecture
Consolidated the categories to allow only 6 to reside in the primary navigation, and 4 other “hidden” categories which will be surfaced by leveraging the use of tags and modules within the site to help recirculate content of interest to the user. i.e. top articles, most popular and sorting by content type (e.g. video, quizzes and checklists)

Navigation items were informed by SEO research (by external company) and card sorting by the research team helped allocate which categories to promote.

Design Solution

Overview

Article and Video
Articles and videos were tackled first to ensure they were optimised for mobile to improve rankings within search engine results.

Main focus in the design of the article page was to improve the readability without distractions and reduce the paradox of choice for the user when deciding what content to view next.

Home and Category landing page
To resolve the discussions between stakeholders on the goal of the editorial site, two directions were created to decide what type of product we wanted to provide for our audience. Direction 1 is a knowledge base of all personal finance needs, where as direction 2 is a guided approach to introduce the Learnvest methodology to financial planning.

A combination of the two design directions were used for the home and category landing pages

Search results
Pages with a list of results had similar template for consistency e.g. search results, content with a specific tag, a special collection/topic, and content by contributor

Resources landing page
A page to review all the interactive media such as tools & calculators, quizzes, slideshows and checklists

Slideshows

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Functional design

As one of the two product designers on the team, I worked on various small improvements throughout the exisiting product as well as new features.

The various screens below were my work within the SimplePractice practice management tool which is a SaaS product for health and wellness professionals.

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Design for an Estate Planning Tool

Opportunity for predictive planning to create estate plans

Where the existing estate planning tools used by Financial Planners provide outputs for a client to review what could happen to their estate if they died today, data scientists within Learnvest were able to create an algorithm to predict what could happen if they died any time in the future.

By layering on the prediction of what year they’re likely to die, the estate plan can become more of a realistic outlook of how much the client’s beneficiaries can receive.

Existing

Current tool used by Financial Planners:

Output of the tool consisted of a flow chart and tables of data:

Prototype

Created by data scientists to validate the algorithm and calculations, the data provided was used to inform what functionality and outputs were available.

I separated the sections on different pages within the final design to prevent from overwhelming the user, as well as to create a step by step process for the Financial Planner to go through.

Sketches

Overall flow

Clickable prototype

Created a prototype to share with Advanced Financial Planners to observe and gather feedback on the design

Final Wireframes (after many iterations)

Landing page for returning users will have previous scenarios saved for quicker access:

Inputs for the distribution strategy with collapsible sections when they are irrelevant to the client:

Main output of the calculations is the summary of the client’s total estate. More details can be shown in a full screen modal:

Quick navigation at the top allows users to click between other scenarios, as well as the ability to compare the scenarios:

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Improving scheduling – iOS app

Problem to solve

Our customers require a quick and scannable way to review their schedule to manage their appointments. As scheduling appointments for Clients are one of the most crucial parts of practice management, we needed to improve the readability in viewing a schedule as well as the ability to improve time management.

Research & Results

As customers are quite often in session seeing their Clients, their least intrusive device to check their messages and schedule is the mobile phone. Through speaking to customers and feature requests, it was validated that the ability to accept & decline appointment requests through the mobile device would provide a lot of value to our customers.

The calendar views include a monthly, weekly and daily view with force touch to create sessions where there is availability.

So that customers could make their best judgement as to whether an appointment could be accepted or declined, we displayed a snippet of the schedule.