A visual communication design-strategy case study
How well-scripted illustrations brought business impact
2 case studies explaining the process of scripting illustrations for intangible experiences aka emotional design that delivered positive business outcomes.
A lot of people believe that the more you use illustrations and spice up with micro-interactions, the more your product becomes design-centric. Not true!
A design centricity is more about the ‘approach’ than the outcome itself. Design centered means human-centered. Informed by the process, in the execution phase, we diligently create design assets like illustrations, icons, graphics, micro-interactions, and even the microcopies to create a universal system of languages between the user and the product. As a result, it enables the user in making the right decisions, delivering expectations, and leading them towards task completion at ease.
The act of creating these design assets for digital products and services is a deliberate one than a random feat of self-expression. They have unique roles to play and enhances user experiences. No matter how great the solutions are, it ultimately needs a vehicle to carry the information and enable communication. Today, the emotional design has set a new benchmark in the product’s user experience.
In this article, I am sharing the process behind creating Illustrations for Emotional design. Often they have mistaken for just delightful decorations or an afterthought in Product development.
CASE 1 | The Brand illustrations that enhanced the user experience.
The Context
In 2017, with Series B funding, Traveltriangle.com was looking into lifting up its NPS for the online products and move towards more design-centered product development. The efforts started with revamping the product for creating a better first impression on the visitors and solve their trust int the brand. We did not have an ATL or BTL marketing done yet.
Here I am discussing the creation of illustrations as a subset of the overall product revamping efforts. We assessed the pros and cons of using illustrations vs photographs. This led to a decision towards building a unique set of brand illustrations. The core hypotheses were,
- This was to give an immediate Brand identity(higher recall value) among the crowd of many holiday products.
- Sharper and consistent communication throughout the customer journey.
To put things into perspective, the following is the comparison between the old version with the new.
The Rationale
These illustrations are made to support the other elements of the page, including the copy, the primary CTAs, and the other actionable items. The colors, the details, a clean background, and even the saturation of the illustrations were debated and carefully picked not to distract the users from their primary task, but to add to their trust and boost their confidence in ‘being at the right place’; especially when we have very little information in the initial stages of the user journey.
Being too specific about a user type would weaken the confidence of the others. As per the data, the majority(>80%) of the users we get are looking for either a romantic/honeymoon trip or a family holiday. In the holiday business, ticket sizes are usually higher in comparison to other daily services. When people are traveling for once or twice a year, it also has a higher decisionmaking time and involves at least two people in most cases.
As a new brand, customer acquisition was the most important point at this stage. A customer’s trust is developed through three stages. The Contractual trust(trust of character) and Communication trust(trust of disclosure)the Competence trust(trust of capability) to put their money on us. This would lead the brand in customer retention and referrals eventually. At each stage, illustrations play different roles in establishing a connection with the product.
The Challenge
The customers are often not very articulate about what they need. Internal motivations are often not verbalized by the users. But it drives their decisionmaking even subconsciously at each touchpoint. For example,
A family holiday customer would stress upon how the decisions are made for or by children and often cases, they don’t express their motivations and biases. No matter how selfless they may sound, almost all the time it is the parent/s who are browsing and making decisions. It is not all that unbiased when it comes to booking holidays for such high ticket prices, but the decision makers involvement is often underrated in family holiday seekers feedback.
An anecdote on how internal motivations drive decisionmaking and the role of visuals in general.
Once my wife was booking a hotel in a new city. She had a few final selections that were very similar to each other in all aspects. Later the one she booked for herself was the one which had a friendly reception picture with female staff. It was not the result of a conscious analysis while booking, but later we assessed the decisionmaking and realized, she felt safer with the one with friendly female staff in the picture.
The point is the customers need not be very articulated during the actual time of booking or maybe over articulated when we poke them with questions. We have to find a middle ground and make a wise decision as it has business implications.
In this era of excessive audiovisual content creation and consumption, the quality of the images and clear communication has become the basic hygiene for any brand communication. It has an undoubtful impact on driving better click-throughs. The success of Airbnb’s story supports this with solid examples.
The Strategy
From the Travel advisors, we understood the unique selling points, as well as the Travelers’ expectations when they discuss their dream holiday ideas. Apart from direct discussion with the travelers, we also learned a great deal from looking into what the travelers post on their social media after the trip. These were critical, as they mostly represented the peak points of their trips. With that, we identified the keywords which then visualized into the final illustrations.
How we scripted the persona for the Father from the user research.
Mr.Sameer is a busy businessman from Delhi. He works even on Sundays and usually takes very little off days. But he never fails to take his family for a summer holiday every year. The last time he took the kids to a beach location, but this time they want to explore the mountains. They are also looking at opportunities to do some water sports and similar activities during the trip. He usually books through another popular brand, but this time he wants to try TravelTriangle.com
While these are obvious choices we need to provide to Mr.Sameer, how do we take his trust and confidence into consideration? What would make him come back to us? Here are a few things we played with to grab his confidence and trust by directly attaching his own internal motivations of the trip.
Sameer is already guilty of not able to spend quality time with his kids in his daily life. His work is intense, and he’s mostly stuck in the interiors of his own office. His unmet needs are the opportunities to strengthen that interpersonal relationship with his kids and engage in things he would have loved to do in his daily life. At the same time, he is not thinking consciously about that much-needed break from routine work as he thinks he’s doing this for his family and not him. We looked at other places for developing the characteristics of a father who is tough but funloving, confident but cozy and certainly should come across as the person who protects the kids. We also took into consideration the average age of the family travelers, their children(from our product usage data) and also studied the social media posts after their travel to understand how they wanted to record their memories while holidaying.
A few suggested readings below
The Output
After the success of the low effort first version(illustrated by Sandeep Virk) , in the second iteration, we added the animation to boost the emotional experience of being at a holiday location by mimicking the feel of the wind. These had to be very subtle as it could also be distracting if overdone. The background elements in the final version were reminiscent of a perfect holiday destination that can’t be mistaken for their home.
The overall theme for the brand illustrations had followed an emotional mood board of ‘Happy travelers’. While the above example of Mr. Sameer gives an idea about one such scenario, each character was well throughout to build such emotional connection and there was a detailed creative process followed to narrow down on the look and feel of the visuals and the final story to be conveyed. We created different scenarios for different traveler types and tried to dynamically customize the views in their early stage of planning holidays.
The project had drastically reduced the bounce rate of the page directly impacting the business metrics and the Net Promotor Score (>60 from ~40)of the holiday planning product.
Acknowledgments
Illustrator: Prakhar Singh | LinkedIn
Design Strategy & Animation: Dhaneesh Jameson
CASE 2 | Theme illustrations that eased decisionmaking.
These themes were initially represented using stock photography. There was nothing unique about them as these images were used by many others in the industry. There was no clear brand differentiation. More than that, the idea was to be able to help the customers move faster and confident with their decisions. Illustrations gave us more control over what to put in these frames hence the communication was way sharper than the stock images. However, bad production can make it counterproductive by adding more confusion or distraction. Here is how we did it.
The Challenge
In the travel domain, there are no specific standard sets of themes in use. For instance, having too similar-looking themes might increase the number of steps and browsing time, and the confusion may lead to midway dropoffs.
The Strategy
We pulled ourselves a few steps back to identify the right themes that are mutually exclusive and also covered the services in its entirety. Identifying the right themes were more important than the quality of the illustration itself.
We did an affinity mapping exercise with an exhaustive list of holiday theme articulations. The outcome from this was further used to build a better systems design (Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for an interconnecting network to satisfy specified functions in order to solve a problem/s. Read more here) for better interaction flow. To give a quick example, the whole thing was divided into a few broad thematic categories based on various mutually exclusive factors like Travel Companion, Things to Do, Places to visit and Seasons to name a few. These sections were further divided into sub-themes. Finally, we prioritized a small list of the most important ones for testing.
The Output
The project had two iterations but illustrations were made on the same fundamental knowledge were we tried to understand each theme from two different angles, from the Travel Advisors, and from the Travelers similar to the exercise done for creating the brand illustrations.
In this case, the internal motivations identified for a person seeking Adventure trips were captured into these keywords- Thrill, Unique, A physically demanding activity. The words were carefully picked to ensure it is not too close similarities to any other themes.
First, we eliminated those activities that are usually seen as difficult for the elderly and looked for more ‘physically challenging’ activities. Deep underwater diving and Skydiving images were particularly helpful in exploring the ‘uniqueness’ as they were nothing closer to our routine lives. Within these, we tried to capture the awestruck moments for bringing in the feeling of ‘thrill’.
Likewise, each theme was given similar thoughts to bring out the right emotional and motivational aspects to establish the best communication with the user and drive their decision making faster.
In the A/B test of Photographs vs Illustration, the illustrated variation came out as the clear winner with higher click-through rates.
Acknowledgments
Illustrator: Anju Shah | LinkedIn
Design Strategy & Animation: Dhaneesh Jameson
Cheers,
Dhaneesh Jameson | LinkedIn
