Redesigning a B2B company website
Company overview
In 2018 I worked on the redesign of the Jupix website. Jupix is a cloud-based property software company owned by Zoopla. It is installed in ‘brick and mortar’ Real Estate companies as a software solution to unify their sales, lettings, property management, website and client accounts so that it’s all in one place. Zoopla wanted the Jupix site updated to reflect the unique value proposition, and encourage other legacy desktop application users to convert to the cloud-based software.
The problem
A significant investment was made in the development of new features in Jupix software; the website was visually outdated and didn’t effectively demonstrate the updated software value proposition. Site content was hard to understand and the analytic data showed users were not progressing down conversion funnels.
Users profile
Our customers were owners or decision-makers of the ‘brick and mortar’ Real Estate business in the United Kingdom. The initial website users were admin staff members in the business who would be reviewing products for the owners or decision-makers. Our product users were the real estate agents who worked in the ‘brick and mortar’ Real Estate business. All of our users have a limited amount of time; they need the software to just work.
Roles and responsibilities
I was the lead designer on the website project. I worked with the business, marketing, and graphic design to establish the businesses needs in the product were met to increase traffic and conversion rates.
I was directly responsible for:
-
Customer research
-
User flows
-
Wireframes
-
Confirming CMS flexibility for designs
-
Working with development to execute the design
Project scope
The entire project was to update all B2B websites owned by Zoopla. This case study focuses on the redesign of Jupix’s website. The constraint of the project was the website would be built on WordPress and have a configurable CMS using a theme that would be used by all B2B websites with only the CSS updated to reflect separate brand guidelines.
Discovery
I learnt about our current user's experience, understood the current competitor landscape and identified the problems the business needed this solution to solve
Design
I designed a solution that would work with multiple brands and would provide clear navigational markers to our user for conversion.
Development
I worked with an external developer to ensure the designs were implemented with a CMS that would enable the marketing team the flexibility for promotions without confusing the visual hierarchy and consistency for users.
Three D’s design approach
Discovering the current problems and what our user expect from a property software website
Through talking with the sales team we discovered that they were using the current website to sell to our customers, but that they preloaded pages on separate tabs as the pages were difficult to find and navigate between. The team told us the biggest complaints were around the amount of technical jargon. Our customers wanted to see examples of features and wanted to know how it would improve their day to day working life.
We validated current challenges through investigating the lack of navigation pathways followed by our users and the high exit rate of the website. We also gather feedback from our current user base to understand easy to digest content and clear feature information was important to our users for them to convert.
We reviewed what our competitors were doing on each product page and how we could leverage this to increase conversion. Our competitors were using a clean aesthetic with minimal wording, removing all technical jargon and a lot of product images.
The business wanted to be able to update the website to promote the new features quickly and in line with development. They wanted to get rid of the old platform with its custom built CMS that was difficult for the marketing team to manage, and limited to the ability to promote the product or update content due to a lack of knowledge about how the CMS worked.
Overall the Jupix’s website was visually outdated, it was difficult to navigate and the pages had been added in an ad hoc nature meaning the pages themselves had no hierarchy. Site content was hard to understand as it had come from multiple sources and there was no clear user journey to convert.
Designing a solution that works for everyone and will increase conversion rates through a new navigational structure
I started this project by establishing our assumptions, talking to business stakeholders early to ensure I had buy-in as we were expecting significant changes to the platform, design and information architecture of the site. We had potential users coming from legacy applications, that would be the business primary target for adopting the software.
The digital marketing executive and I looked at our sites current analytics, to map out the current process and identify the hurdles our customers were facing. This enabled us to create a new site map with a clear signposting on the navigational pathways to convert users.
I, alongside the digital marketing executive, reviewed the current website content, highlighting any jargon terms and changing the language to a helpful and informal tone. Structuring the way the content was displayed through bullet-pointed lists, short sentences and quick answers to why this is worth the monetary investment.
I started my prototypes by sketching how I could show features visually but still keep pages short, without hiding information. I created wireframes with a clean aesthetic in which the software became the focal point. My focus was to link the content and feature details with visuals of the software feature.
A particular section of the website I created was a single place for all the benefits of where you could toggle between the bulleted highlights and see each feature of the Jupix product. Enabling a single location for the sales team to navigate between features in real-time when on-site in a sales meeting.
Development of the solution and working with an external developer to realise the design solution
The marketing executive and I mapped out all the designs onto a project board and began reducing them down to ‘templatable’ elements that would become the framework for our CMS. I created brand guidelines to accompany my designs which we handed over in 5 web page templates that encompassed all the elements required for the marketing team to build out the pages.
Outcome
The website was successful in demonstrating the value of Jupix to our audience. We saw a 297% increase YoY in page/session on google analytics, showing our users were more engaged and exploring more of the website.
We also saw an 82% reduction in the average bounce rate in the site, showing the users are clicking through and finding what they expect to see. The marketing team was happy with the new WordPress CMS as this aligned to their skillset and was easy for them to maintain and update.