LincEdge Website Redesign
UX/UI Case Study
Imagine…
You are the owner of a small contract firm in construction, after a long day at work, you are planning the next couple of weeks of work. You notice that one week you are waiting for a site to be ready, while there are 4 jobs going the week following. You realize you don’t have enough personnel to work those days. You struggle to find a way to source credible skilled workers for the upcoming work ahead and wonder what to do with the guys given a likely work shorter on a quieter week.
What Does LincEdge Do?
The primary problem facing Skilled Trades in BC is the rising demand for trades against a falling supply. This is increasingly felt across most skilled trades sectors, but particularly in the construction industry. Additionally, there are instances where sites are not ready when capacity is available. Often firms wait for a site because of the linear construction process (e.g. flooring needs to happen before cabinets). This can create unpredictable and protracted waits and when sites are ready, pressure builds to do more work than the firm is capable of supporting. This swing between peak loads and waiting site readiness is the sweet spot for LincEdge. Their goal is to allow independent contractors and owners to share capacity, offering their services when idle, and sourcing labour when in peak demand, optimizing efficiency across the board.
Their app, which is currently on iOS and will soon be released on Android later this year, focuses on giving a B2B platform as a means of sharing human resources between construction owners/contractors. The main benefits of this app is to source from a trusted network of business owners to reduce overhead and find skilled workers.
LincEdge’s mission is to create and grow a network for owners of skilled trade businesses and freelancers, making it safe to connect, source and share labour as needed.
For this project our team which consisted of 3 User Experience Designers and 2 User Interface designers, was tasked with tackling our client’s and user’s pain points.
Key Research Insights
Our client had a website which was currently hosted through Wix. The main pain point of our client felt they had was that their website ineffective at in communicating their value to potential customers. Working with this information our team set out to look at what was available and see if we could narrow down the scope of our project since our timeline for this sprint was only 3 weeks. The UX team quickly created a survey and lined up interviews to gather more insight to where we could create the most value.
Creating Authenticity & Trust
One of the largest areas we found during the Research phase was that trust and credibility were a large part of what the target users were looking for. Our research revealed that most of the target users were males between the age of 25 and 44 and owned a small business, usually numbering less than 20 employees.
“It’s hard to outsource to companies you don’t know because they have to be credible and reliable to know that they do a good job…if there is a mistake, the blame is on you…”
— Rana B.
This leads to these small business owners to stay within their own networks when it comes to finding and outsourcing work.
“…Usually companies get their customers and move through their own channels: by phone or by email because they already have their network.”
— Antonio J.
From our interviews with these industry people, our team learned that being credible would be a key contributor to engaging our target users.
Additionally, the environment for many of these workers was usually high all year round that usually comes in short waves of work. As a result of this, business owners usually found it hard to find new networks to outsource to or train additional workers because they simply did not have the time to do it.
“When we’re really busy, it’s hard to train because it slows you down when you bring in a new guy… so you just got to work through it”
— Rana B.
The Need For Content
With that insight in mind, we looked at LincEdge’s current website. We began by looking at their Google Analytics to see where their traffic was was coming from to give us some insight into how users were currently using their website.
A big insight our team found was that users were leaving the main pages at an astonishingly high rate. This piece of evidence led us to believe that the users were either not finding the information that they wanted through the site, or that they couldn’t take any sort of action on that page and were led elsewhere. To look into this further, we performed an SEO site audit to give us more insight.
The most revealing insight this approach gave us was that it was ranking the current website’s content as ‘very lacking’. This meant that Google’s algorithm was determining that there wasn’t a significant amount of content for the user to read through. We understand that this amount can be arbitrary to the user, taking into account that our users placed a high amount of value on trust and credibility, this led our team to go along with Google’s recommendation.
Verifying Findings
From these two key insights, we thought it necessary to take some users through the website and create a customer journey map to validate our previous insights.
As we moved through the website it quickly became apparent that users wanted to know more, however, as they dug deeper into the website, the information they found either:
- Didn’t trust the website as it looked ‘fake’ or ‘stock’
- Couldn’t see the value proposed
- Hard to understand because of the jargon used
Gut Testing
In order to get a better idea of what kind of voice and our client wanted, our UI counterparts conducted a gut test on Marilyn, the CEO of the company. They gathered insights into what type of art directions she gravitated to in order to help expand her existing branding. This also gave our UX team additional insight into what our client wanted from a business perspective.
Business Considerations
Before we moved to the next phase, it is important to note that our team also had to keep in mind certain business decisions that had already been made. These were primarily based on:
- The logo could not be changed as money had already gone into trademarking
- Their app, for the most part was still in the Beta testing phase
- Much of the content had not been flushed out yet (like pricing and blog) however we still had to take these elements into consideration
The Design Challenge
As we compiled our data, we noticed that there were definitely some emerging trends and patterns. Most notably, that business owners had to have a high level of trust in their networks in order for them to work with a particular company or even piece of technology.
Creating A User Persona
To help keep our team on track, we created a user persona to help us base our design decisions on. This was to ensure that our end product would be delivering real value to the user. Enter Jeff:
Defining Our ‘Why’
Ultimately our ‘why’ came down to being respected in your community and having a network that you can trust.
Jeff wants to have access to reliable, credible, and trustworthy workers, in order maintain a stable workflow.
This boiled down into a few key words that we used for the overall brand value for LincEdge.
User Needs, Business Goals & Project Must-Have’s
From here we used this as a platform to connect with our user goals and business goals in order to come up with our project must-have’s:
- Optimize content being communicated
- Emphasize on user values
- Include reviews to grow credibility
- Have a link to external pages (ie. blog)
- Needs to be responsive for both desktop & mobile
Prototyping & Testing
Design Studio
For this phase, both the UX and UI team sat down to try to come up with layouts that could serve as a potential solution for the new website. We knew that it was important to communicate how much value the app gives to the customer, especially on the home page. We decided to incorporate within the home page instead of having a separate page to it so that these testimonials would speak to a particular feature or benefit.
Low Fidelity To Mid Fidelity Prototypes
As we solidified our design sketches, we began to build our prototypes, first starting on paper and then moving to wireframes, all while testing along the way (results will be covered in the “Testing” section below).
Testing
As we tested our paper prototype, we noticed that we could further optimize what content we could be displaying to the user.
Key Takeaways:
- Ensure we had a clear narrative as the user is going down the Home page
- Introduce what scenario the user would be using this
- Adjust CTA buttons to make it more clear that they were signing up to become a beta user
The Power Of A/B Testing
There were a few sections in where our team couldn’t unanimously decide on a particular design, so we turned to this form of testing in order to see what our users thought would make more sense. This proved to be very valuable for us, as it provided us a more clear direction to go on other than our own “designer gut”. Just to note that we didn’t do this on every screen, but rather particular sections due to the timeline of our project.
Art Direction
Our UI team sent 2 art directions to our client. After some adjustments and tweaking the final form of their branding and style guide began to take hold.
High Fidelity Screens
Once we were good with the Mid fidelity layout for both desktop and responsive platforms, we began moving our designs into high fidelity. Working with our UI counterparts, we began the task of replacing placeholder text with content from their website and from the information we had gathered from our research. Of course, we would need to convey that some of the content would still be placeholders until a final decision on our client’s side had been reached, but at least this way they could see a more complete version of what the final product would include.
Future Considerations
Moving forward, we realize that there is still a lot of opportunity with this website, especially once it gets into the swing of becoming fully available for download on iOS and Android, so we made sure to share these insights with our client. The most notable of these insights include:
- Web Portal integration so that users can have access to their info on their desktops
- Native blog
- Strategy positioning to include workers, not just business owners due to potential market reach
- Custom iconography
- Potential for expanding the current brand
Main Takeaways
The main lesson that I learned from this experience was to get creative when traditional methods of research don’t necessarily work out. Despite being a pretty simple website, a big challenge we faced was that since our client was targeting business owners, our reach of potential users wasn’t very big. Getting responses for surveys and even some interviews proved to be difficult to secure. So instead, we went through analytics and site audits to gather our information.
