Applicaa website redesign case study

In today’s competitive digital landscape, having a strong online presence is essential. This article documents my journey as a designer to redesign the website for Applicaa, a UK-based software development company. As the UX research and ideation lead, I worked with another designer to conceptualize and redesign the website.

01 — Project Overview

About Applicaa

Applicaa is a rising start in the ed-tech industry in the UK, renowned for its flagship product, Admissions+ — a cutting-edge digital admissions management system. The platform is already in use in over 1300+ schools in the UK and overseas, with its popularity surging.

Admissions+ is a powerful software platform that enables web-based enrolment from initial inquiry to acceptance or admission using a fully digitized process. Removing the need for paper, printed forms and data-entry in the admissions office, Admissions+ can save schools time and money.

Challenges

Despite its remarkable product, Applicaa’s website suffered from a lack of aesthetics, logical navigation, and content structure. The existing website failed to do justice to the brand’s purpose, resulting in confusion rather than coherence.

The solution: a website redesign.

The primary objective was to create a cohesive system capable of representing the diverse content Applicaa was producing, including blogs, customer success stories, webinars, and a knowledge base. Moreover, the redesign aimed to deliver a polished and professional website that showcased the brand’s personality, facilitated an understanding of the company’s value, and offered a positive user experience through relevant content.

Goals

• Functional

Enhance website functionality to improve sales by providing multiple points of contact such as phone, email, social media, and an easy-to-use contact form.

• User-friendly

Develop an intuitive sitemap to optimize the visitor experience, catering to both search-oriented users and casual browsers.

• Engaging

Elevate the website’s visual appeal, professionalism, and polish to make it more captivating.

My approach to the redesign

The Discovery phase aimed to understand and frame a problem area, collect requirements, and analyzing the context of use.

The Delivery phase is the solution space that makes ideas tangible, usable, and beautiful.

Tools used

• Google Drive
• Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Docs
• Slack
• Balsamiq
• Adobe Xd
• WordPress

02 — Project Debriefed

Research

Competitive Analysis Summary

Applicaa’s website suffered from inconsistent design and weak content structure compared to its competitors. However, its product, Admissions+, stood out for its integration capabilities with leading MIS providers and flexibility in customization, demonstrating responsiveness to customer needs. By highlighting these strengths and adopting a modern website design, Applicaa had the potential to become the top choice for schools in the UK and overseas seeking online admissions solutions.

User Personas Summary

The evaluation of Applicaa’s old website centered on common user needs and potential pain points. Given the growing ed-tech market and the novelty of digital admissions platforms in the UK, most visitors were browsers, who like clicking around and exploring various aspects of the site. The redesign efforts were tailored to accommodate these user behaviors:

Identify key problem areas

In summary, some of the major concerns with the website:

• The path to important information is unclear and unengaging, which makes it hard to navigate potential clients in the right direction.
• Not many potential customers are aware of all Admissions+’s benefits and features due to a lack of quality & relevant content for targeted audiences. The unawareness demotivates them from taking further actions of buying.
• Overall the visuals are poor and the website looks very outdated with weak call-to-actions and use of very few branding colors on the website.

Website improvement opportunities

Once we found out the issues, the next step is to find solutions for each identified problem. One of the first changes we make about Applicaa website is to use WordPress as the building tool instead of having it built from scratch by the developers as we used to. The reason is to not rely too much on the developers’ time and availability so that the content will be more up-to-date and the marketing team can easily take care of the search engine ranking with many SEO plug-ins for WordPress.

Other improvements include:

• Restructure site map & easy navigation menu with some new pages added. Applicaa’s new site structure should be typical, where most links are accessible through top navigation.
• Bold hero sections with original illustrations and videos. The main goal is not aesthetics, but communication as a personalize and customize the brand and to make the site more user friendly.
• A wide breadth of up-to-date and well-structured content that speaks to targeted audiences. Highlight the product’s USP of integration partnerships and build brand credibility with a separate page dedicated to customer reviews.
• Consistent style of UI. Update and refresh the website’s UI, expose, and refine Applicaa branding.
• Increase user interaction on the website with stronger CTAs, contact forms, and chatbots.

03 — Ideation

Along with the redesign in terms of UI and UX, a wide breadth of content will be added to Applicaa’s new website. After working with the marketing team, we came up with the following core types of content (some new, some existing):

Therefore, it is important to define the Information architecture (IA), which is like a blueprint, a visual representation of the product’s infrastructure, features, and hierarchy so anyone (theoretically) should be able to read it and understand how Admissions+ works and helps schools’ admissions process.

Fixed error pages and added some new pages

Wireframe

A wireframe is a graphic representation of an app or a website containing the most essential elements and the content. The goals of wireframing for Applicaa new website are:

• To show the main chunks of content
• To draw the outline and the layout structure
• To depict the most basic UI

UI elements

A user interface is through which the user interacts with the system. It serves as a bridge between the system and the user. If the UI (User Interface) is good then the user would definitely like to spend more time on it. It is the job of the designer to make the UI look fresh and clear.

The UI components combined with the illustrations create a very compelling homepage, making it a wonderful example of smart UX design.

Final say

Overall, reflecting on this process helped to highlight Applicaa’s strengths, and to get rid of blockers to improve user experience on Applicaa’s website, as well as all the learnings that I can use to improve my design process next time.

Key takeaways:

• Never start the design process until you get all the business requirements
• Never jump into the visual design until you are happy with how your solution works (UX).
• Always spend time during the discovery process, to put some thinking on whether you are doing the right thing…And validate all assumptions before any design is created.

Overall, I believe this was a successful first Website Redesign Case Study based on the amount that I have learned about how to conduct a UI redesign and the dos and don’ts of the various steps. In the future, I would also like to spend more time on usability testing and iterating over my high-fidelity prototype as those are very important steps. Insight from my target users is very valuable in building a successful site.

References

• ‘Searchers and Browsers: the Personality Types of UX’ by Tucker FitzGerald (https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/searchers-and-browsers-the-personality-types-of-ux/)
• ‘Search Behavior Patterns’ by John Ferrara (https://boxesandarrows.com/search-behavior-patterns/)
• ‘Website browsing behaviour patterns’ by Ross Johnson (https://3.7designs.co/blog/2017/10/website-browsing-behavior-patterns/)