— Fintech startup focused on fixing missed milestones and hard-to-track paperwork that investors, lawyers, and founders face in closing investment deals. —

Role
Visual Designer

Problem

Anduin was struggling to get conversions on their site, even though the biz devs were making connections at events, reaching out to potential clients, and doing presentations. The conversion rate on Anduin’s site was just not delivering.

Research

The team conducted interviews with current/potential users and looked at website analytics to figure out where the drop-off was while gaining candid feedback on where the pain points were.

What we found

Overall, the website was underwhelming. Other feedback given through research and analyzing site data was:

• Users were dropping off before reaching the product page

• The branding lacked consistency

• There were too many pages to navigate

• Content was not enticing enough to inspire demo request

• Illustrations didn’t provide trust and felt too cartoony

ORIGINAL LANDING PAGE

In this original Data room landing page, it wasn’t immediately clear to users what was being advertised. With tiny text, the words “data room” in the the hero asset being the only place above-the-fold that it appears. The icons are mismatched and the content was just table stakes, not offering the users anything that would inspire a demo request.

The final landing page is more direct in telling users “This is Data Room!”. With the hero featuring it twice in the text and once in the asset. I created better UI assets that connected and highlighted what made Anduin’s product special and CTA’s for demos are visible at all times.

FINAL LANDING PAGE

Solution

The team interviewed current and potential clients, combined with website analytics to figure out the growth areas for the site. What was said was that it felt too confusing.

We decided to prioritize moving towards a G-suite style of products. Stripping away a lot of fluff and whole pages from the product sites. This change helped Anduin get straight to the point on what they had to offer their users. While immediately giving all users an overview of available products.

How we made that happen

Creating a harmonious website

Going through the original site, the branding was all over the place. I found that it had three different sets of iconography living on different pages at the same time and a lack of consistency across the content.

Original Icons

There was a lack of consistency with the original iconography and this caused disconnect when going from page to page.

First iteration - Custom Icons

Visually beautiful, but was not sustainable due to heavy time-consumption and many become obsolete in the final rebrand. Users also spent longer deciphering them.

Final - Icon License Pack

Changed the visual hierarchy for icons and lowered it to represent simpler ideas. Thus, buying an icon pack license to allocate my time to working on creating higher impact assets.

Decluttering the illustrations
As a team, we discussed how we can create illustrations that resonated with our user base and not just as filler for a subheading for the page. Each component of the site was going to be used to entice conversion and less time spent deciphering what the illustration means.

The first iterations of illustrations were too abstract and represented what the product could do for the user as a whole. These were more of a collection of ideas that weren’t focused but looked pretty. Because of time-constraints and the original website’s lack of illustrations, these had to be initially shipped.

FINAL ILLUSTRATIONS

Final illustrations

I thought of ways how we could utilize the illustrations to bridge the gap between intangible features to something that resonated with our users. For example, security on Anduin’s platform was a key selling point and was better represented as a singular idea in an illustration with easily recognizable objects.

These got better feedback from users who were compelled to stop and actually read the copy.

Original UI assets

Legacy assets were just screenshots of the UI. This wasn’t reasonable long-term because:

• Had to create copy for each component of the screenshots, because we couldn’t just take real client’s data for the site.

• There was too much text. What does the user focus on?

• It wasn’t visually interesting.

First iteration UI asset

I did away with the need to write copious amounts of copy and only displayed words that we wanted users to read. While it was simplified, there were still some pain points that needed to be addressed:

• There was a negative connotation with “Flag as an issue” tooltip being the first thing the users read.

• There were a lot of different shapes that made this asset feel cluttered, such as the top banner, all the “blurred” text lines, tooltip, and comment section.

Final iteration

The final iteration actually produced two separate assets. The first one focusing on how issue tracking notifications would be introduced as a collaboration tool and the second one giving the users an overall breadth of Issue Tracker’s platform and many of its key features.

We learned that highlighting Issue Tracker's ability to integrate into a user’s workflow was beneficial and warranted its own separate value prop.

With this, I finalized a template for any future UI assets including the top nav bar, buttons, flags, and spacing.

Results and impact

After simplifying the flow, users actually spent less time on our site and saw an increase from 5% to 12% demos requested. This was beneficial because it meant users found what they were looking for faster instead of spending more time on a confusing website.

Reflection & Retro

My time at Anduin was a whirlwind and delightfully challenging because it allowed me to work cross-functionally with different time zones, juggling different priorities, and pivoting at a moment’s notice.

Looking back, the first rebrand was incredibly short-lived. I spent a huge amount of effort creating custom iconography and illustrations. Within a month of launch, we were pivoting to simplifying the website, with all of the icons and illustrations becoming obsolete when pages were stripped.

The final new revamp actually took less effort overall due to the fact that it had 3x fewer pages and assets. To do this again, I would’ve pushed for more time dedicated to researching and testing the user journey earlier in the process.