A woman of color-led DEI consulting firm needs to launch their web presence from scratch in order to attract new clients and build a diverse network. This requires responsive web design, branding, subscription options, testimonials, and social proof.
What is most important to research when designing the look and feel of a new DEI consulting firm?
Before our next meeting, I was tasked with performing a competitive analysis of DEI companies offering similar services.
Due to time and resource constraints, I had to work with what was feasible in order to design and get wireframes in front of stakeholders. I spoke with some folks experienced in DEI consulting, did some competitive analysis, and that was enough research to dive into wireframing.
After getting a good feel of what other websites have to offer, and scraping together content that the team compiled in Google Docs, I found a simple Figma wireframing kit for desktop.
Running through usability tests with team members surfaced major issues early on. These issues likely would have gone unnoticed without having other people click-through the prototype.
Rachel and I met on the weekend to discuss the flow of the website and troubleshoot the prototype. The critique began with a great ask, “Can you please walk me through this and explain the rationale behind your design decisions?”
When a user lands on the site, they don’t want to immediately see the services offered. Why should they care? Because there is a testimonial of someone who has bought the service and is satisfied, or a list of trustworthy companies who have bought in.
This was important because if the user didn’t bother to click the CTA and blindly scroll down they would still be able to find the services offered. This is arguably the most important piece of information besides the statement of purpose.
Variation of text and imagery should be consistent. The list of services had the images placed left, right, right, which was scrambling the viewer’s eyes. I changed the positioning to left, right, left.
Customer testimonials work in a similar way to "Trusted By" sections. Research shows that seeing human faces can evoke positive emotions. Combining positive feelings with an honest quote about working with the company helps create buy-in, and sparks the user's interest in what the company has to offer.
Women of color who are focused, enjoying what they do, and hard at work. This works as a good place-holder until we do a photoshoot of the co-founders in their real work environment.
Let the user decide if they are interested in the services first. Only then would they want to learn about the team and their history.
I shared the wireframe via email and presented to our team during our next meeting. We agreed on the flow and that I should move on to a higher fidelity.
Since we are a small team I coded the website to make it responsive using the designs as a blueprint. I also injected Hotjar and Google Analytics into the site to gain more insight into user behavior.
Part I covered the UX process used to launch our company web presence from scratch.
Part II covers redesign of the website and user behavior analysis.
We received floods of compliments on how great our company website looks.
Customers who did not know about the company were able to Google Envision Inclusion and reach out after exploring the site.
The forms on our site were used by people who are interested in our business and led to contracts.
Led to our first authentic POC newsletter subscribers (not just robots).
Network and contact forms were used by clients and led to multiple contracts. Woot!
The "Our Network" page became one of the most viewed pages and received form submissions for both contracts and networking.
