Rebranding WG Gesucht — Case Study
This case study explores how I created a new brand for the WG-Gesucht app.
How I chose the app
The challenge was focus on redefining the brand and the UI of an app. I chose WG Gesucht as it is a widely used app in Germany for young people. The app enables to find and post offers of flatshares and sublets. However, having experiences it myself, I noticed a big space for improvement, both in terms of UI and UX. The orange brand looks outdated and not in line with the brand attributes of a company in this domain. I was excited to take the challenge to create a fresh and new brand!
Getting familiar with the app
I started by creating clones of the current screens, to have a better idea of the design systems and components they’re using. It helped have a clear idea of their atomic pieces and already gave me ideas of improvements.
I decided to define the scope of my work and to reduce it to redesign 3 screens on top of the global branding: The homepage, a flat page, the profile page, as they are key pages and are very different from each other.
I ran a heuristic analysis for the user interface design. I focused on analysing the visibility of system status, the match between system and the real world and the consistency and standards. This helped me to spot features/sections that could be improved.
Visual competitive analysis
I decided to run a visual competitive analysis with 3 competitors in the flat finding market, from different countries: Immoscout (Germany), SeLoger (France) and Idealista (Italy, Spain). I looked into logos, and screenshots of the 3 screens I will redesign. From these I extracted their main colour palettes.
- Branding: The dark mode on Immoscout and the clear and sharp look on SeLoger are very efficient. They have a clear brand and accent colour. Idealista is very pop and young and has a easily memorable logo.
- Homepage: Immoscout and Seloger directly show new offers and enable to navigate between saved searches. The image and search bar on Idealista’s homepage take a lot of space.
Creating the new brand
For this app, I came back to the essential: the audience of the app. It’s young people, sometimes international, multicultural, who want to find a safe space to life, share, meet and grow. It led me to create this moodboard, and brand attributes. From the moodboard, I extracted a first palette of colours.
Experimenting the UI
I started by creating a mid-fi wireframe with the structure of sections I had in mind, so I could be able to apply and test colours and fonts.
I researched fonts and Satoshi font came as a fresh, clear, young and versatile choice.
After a few experimentations and feedback from peers, I created the following style tile:
To see if the brand worked well, I tried applying it on real-life mockups in the form of ads (with really quick copy I created):
Creating the High fidelity mockups
Once I was sure the brand worked well, I created a set of new component and created the following high fidelity screens:
A few new elements that I wanted to fix with these new screens:
- Homepage: I wanted to have a top bar that enables to navigate between saved/past searches, and then a button “modify” to modify the search selected. This frees some space from the old screen that dedicated a full sections with cards for this. I also added a section for “New flats for your search”, and one for “Explore the map”.
- Profile page: all the categories used to be not organised at all. I decided to split them and organise them by clear categories, so that the user could easily find what they want
- Flat page: I got rid of unecessary icons/features, simplified and grouped the display of information. Merged two sections into one with this double beige section. Created a clearer layout for the description and used more modern icons. Get rid of the slide pictures icon that took some real estate and include it directly on the picture.
Before/after
What I learnt doing this case study
- The importance of structuring the competitive analysis: I noticed that the visual competitive analysis could quicly become very long and disorganised. To be able to compare, it would be useful to structure each information in a table and compare the exact same informations with the ones from competitors.
In summary, this case study has solidified my UI and branding skills, making me realise that I really enjoy working on that spectrum of UX/UI design.