EvenVision Services
Establishing industry leadership through targeted user experience.
Legacy Agency Design Project -> from 2018
The back story
What started as a small business of part-time crew of three staff supporting a dozen clients, had over the years grown into a team of 9 people full-time supporting hundreds of clients and businesses across the west coast.
However, while we had focused on developing awesome new systems and solutions for our clients we hadn’t invested time in making sure that our own website was maintained and properly expressed the scope and scale of the work that we could accomplish. To kick start the campaign I first gave attention to our website case studies after which I was able to take the learnings from these and turn my attention to our outdated services page.
The Problem We Faced
The problem that I was faced with was how to express the wide variety of services that our company now offered, while accomplishing the task of convincing a wide range of clients that we were had solutions for their unique problems.
How the company was currently trying to promote our services online was through a single page. However, we knew that this strategy was woefully bad as it suffered from a significant Bounce Rate (meaning people arrived and quickly left). Additionally we knew from a relatively basic qualitative analysis of initial prospect conversations that when people contacted us they genuinely knew very little about what our company was able to accomplish for them.
Together this data told me that we were losing potential client and not maximizing the true potential of clients we had owing to their lacking ability to self-discover opportunity.
The Important Questions.
The question that drove me:
“How might we improve the experience for visitors landing our own website who are seeking services for their business that we are the correct company for their needs?”
Key Metrics that I wanted to improve:
Click-through to contact page
Conversion through contact submission
# of Inquiries regarding agile & ongoing retainer services
SEO ranking across key terms in key Markets
Secondary Metrics I sought to impact:
Raw entry on services page/system
Duration of average service page visit
Reduction in bounce rate
% of return users
In addition to the user experience improvements, we were also looking for three other benefits:
Development of a scalable data system for future improvements.
Development of a website section that mapped to Search Engine Optimization best practices.
A design that showcased the now only our visual skills but also capitalized on our engineering depth.
Conceptual & Development Research
I began this project by leading our team in a series of design research exercises to help us figure out a direction to pursue.
Competitive Analysis
Word-Concept Association
Card Sorting
Some key findings of the research include the consolidation in a service direction framed around:
EvenVisions Solution Framework: Understand, Build, Optimize
Project Types vs Capabilities
Agile & Ongoing Solutions
Personas
From here I begun to map out the solution across key technology constraints that so that we could ensure our design solution would be not only technology feasible but optimized for search engine performance.
The Design Solution
The design ultimately manifested itself as three distinct sections that cross-referenced key content, and mapped to our Solution Framework.
Capabilities
This started by mapping out 45 key EvenVision Capabilities which ranged from Visual Design to CMS & CRM Development. These capabilities were identified as key areas of strength for our business and designed in a way that provided us a direct comparison to key competitors. Each one of these capabilities was given a simple 1-2 sentence description designed to provide a visitor context as well as boost SEO for that particular term. Capabilities were then sorted under the solution framework, and given a binary ranking of “Common” or “Niche” so that we could highlight key capabilities. Each of these capabilities was designed and built as a “component” that could be tagged and dynamically pulled into the other sections.
Project Types
I began by mapping out the 6 core Project types, ranging from eCommerce to Product Development that we had identified in research. Each project type was constructed of a series of “tags” and mapped to our Solution Framework with key structures of the page designed to map to a part of the Understand, Build and Optimization breakdown. Next I took key case studies from our site and dynamically pulled in content and testimonials from the clients we had helped under each project type. Additionally each project type had a custom content strategy implemented to map to the unique personas that we had uncovered in our research. Lastly, each project type received a customized call to action that once again mapped to the context above and the personas we had structure our content after.
Agile & Ongoing
As part of a larger shift in our business model I designed and developed a key section of our services that was devoted to advertising the work we had been doing with clients over the years through monthly retainers. This section mirrored a lot of the strategic decisions made for project types, but featured an additional key section focused on mapped our the retainer framework which was an extension of our Solution Framework.
Implementation
The Results
This was a fairly comprehensive project and ultimately I was proud to see the results we were able to achieve.
Key Metric Results:
Click-through to contact page = +68% monthly
Conversion through contact submissions = +45% monthly
# of Inquiries regarding agile & ongoing retainer services ~ estimated 3 monthly
SEO ranking across key terms in key Markets = Typical term jump + 120 positions
Secondary Metrics Results:
Raw entry on services page/system = +232%
Duration of average service page visit = + 1500% (5 mins compared to 20 seconds)
Reduction in bounce rate = Bounce rate dropped from 75% to 24%
% of return users = + 98%
These results were substantial for our business as inquiries from key markets doubled within 3 months, and the total value of our converted clients in a half quadrupled.
Future Direction
This was one of the last projects that I undertook directly for EvenVision prior to my departure to Facebook. However, I was able to lay out the following as potential expansions on the system.
Rich Inquiry “Cart”: This would allow an individual to “favorite” a particular service and be provided with a sliding scale and “importance” metric to build an inquiry with an understanding of the value they wanted to place behind solutions that they were seeking in addition to providing them an understanding of a cost range that they might expect from their inquiry. This would also allow us to provide post-conversion automated support through customized follow-up emails that mapped to the solution and subsequently pointed them in the direction of our comprehensive articles for additional context.
Dynamic Case Study Integration: While we had Case Studies dynamically plug into services, I was seeking to expand upon the idea by allowing custom call-outs within our case studies that mapped to Key capabilities and Project types to provide more context for our visitors.
Personal Reflections
This project ultimately became one of my favorite success stories during my time at EvenVision. One key reason is that I was able to implement basic UX research methodology to great impact because this project not only changed I thought about our business structure, but how people on the outside perceived our company.
As a last note, without even realizing it I had inadvertently developed a Solution Framework that mapped closely to the Human Centered Design process. It was only after I started in on my Masters Degree at University of Washington that I realized the connection.