Case study: Designing an event landing page
A mini case study from my learning on how to design a landing page from scratch
For our second assignment at 10kdesigners, I got a visual design challenge to create a landing page for a given niche. The idea could be an event, a workshop, webinar, hackathon, or a virtual event. The goal of the assignment was to learn the design process and be creative with visual design. With this case study, I’m sharing my design process and learnings from this challenge. So please go through it and let me know what do you feel about it.
Coming up with the idea
There were various interesting topics to pick from, like — Ed-tech, gaming, baking 🎂 etc. I was assigned a creative design niche to work on. I was super excited about it, and I started looking for ideas to include in my work. Though it sounds simple, it’s a rabbit hole. Once you start looking for topics, it isn’t very easy to stay focused. As Abhinav also discussed in one of our sessions at 10kdesigners, this gives you a sense of work done, and you think you are productive, but that’s an illusion, and one has to stay focused.
After throwing away a few days, I listed down a number of workshop ideas to start working on. On my list, I had a clay modeling workshop, resin art workshop, Mandala art workshop, Gond painting, and Handblock printing workshop. All of these options were fascinating, and I chose to go ahead with the idea of Handblock printing.
Research
Talking to friends and acquaintances about these kinds of workshops helped me understand the user perspectives. I had open discussions with them that included topics and questions like:
- How do you normally get to know about interesting workshops? (Google ads / Instagram page / Facebook)
- What are the key factors that would convince you to join a workshop?
- What is the price range that you expect for this kind of workshop?
- How was your experience at the workshop? If it is was as per your expectation and if not, what was missing?
These user interviews also highlighted some pain points:
- Only getting to know the process of hand block printing and not understanding the process of using dyes and choosing the right fabric.
- Not receiving email confirmation right after the booking.
- The failed transaction issue and the money got debited twice. And how contacting the organizers was a challenge.
In this process, I recognized two different types of users. One who is a newbie and putting her hands on block for the first time and second who understands the art and loves to dive deeper and excel their skills.
Visiting Anokhi Museum
Now that I had an idea about what I wanted to work on and some useful insights from user interviews, it was time to visit some place where the real action was happening. I chose the Anokhi Museum out of my love for the brand Anokhi. The brand was started by art enthusiasts John and Faith Singh in the ’60s to conserve and promote the local textile arts of Sanganer and Bagru near Jaipur.
A visit to the Anokhi museum allowed me to meet the artisans and understand the process of hand block printing. I took notes on the nitty-gritty of the process and printed my very own napkin using hand blocks.
Information Architecture
After coming back from the Museum, I had the required info and basic research over my topic. Now it was time for me to connect the dots. So I started writing about the information to be shown on the page. Trigger warning: Yes, I wrote on those three sticky notes from the wrong end and hence the shadows. Also, looking for an offline Figma shortcut to “Tidy up.”
The most important info points about the workshop were:
- What is happening? (Does it aligns with user interest)
- Where is it happening? (Whether she will be able to attend)
- When is it happening? (Availability of the user)
- How much is it going to cost me? (To take a decision)
Call To Action: The primary call to action, this being a workshop, is to get a seat reserved by the user. Therefore, it should be approachable and visible at multiple places on the landing page to grab the user’s attention as and when they are convinced. For instance, Anika, an art enthusiast, may like to book the workshop right after looking at the date/time stamp in the hero section. While, on the other hand, Neha would like to check what all is included and what other users have to say about the workshop. So we can’t put the CTA button only on the Hero Section or the Navigation Bar.
Source Channel: Another point is that people would come on this landing page from various sources, like referrals from a friend, direct links on WhatsApp, Instagram posts, and look for different kinds of information. So, keeping this in mind, I rearranged all of these sticky notes on a piece of paper to create a hierarchy of information. I am sure there will be many iterations before the end result, but right now, this looks good.
Wireframes
Once the picture was clear, I started with pen and paper wireframes. After many iterations, playing with the info I had, and the kind of workshop landing pages I saw during my research, I finalized these versions to be good starting points.
Hero section
About the workshop section
There were two options in this section:
- Brand info and About the workshop in the text on the left and a pictorial collage of workshop’s highlight on the right.
- Less text and a video highlighting the workshop and the brand.
Artist info and FAQ section
In the artist info section, a short description of the artist with a personal story and the brand association would work well. Along with this, a picture of the artist working will give a face to the story.
The FAQ section should be designed to answer a probable question that indicates that the questions should indeed be frequently asked.
As Rob Hope says in his book, Landing page Hot Tips:
A list of unsorted FAQs is not helpful to your Landing Page visitor, who is presumably confused at this point in their journey.
Social proof and pricing plan
As human beings, we are always looking for conformity. So, when we see other people buying or using a product and having a good view about it, it positively affects our buying decision. Therefore, I decided to place social proofs — like written testimonials and video reviews right after the pricing section. This would be aimed at the user still not deciding on paying the price, who might need more convincing. In addition, having other people saying good words about our workshop could increase our conversion.
I went around to look for pricing plan patterns on various websites for inspiration. It turns out, as many pricing plans are there, equally more the number of options. While in the beginning, I was only focused on one pricing plan, I realized having more than one would also help me anchor my pricing.
I decided to go with two plans to keep it simple. One would include access to the workshop only, and the other one would also include a stay.
“Give people who would be happy to pay you more money, the opportunity to pay you more money.”
~ Adam Wathan, author of Refactoring UI and creator of Tailwind CSS
Lo-fi wireframe of the landing page
After adding all of the above components and a secondary call to action button for signing up for the newsletter and the updates about future workshops above the footer frame, my low fidelity wireframe for the assignment was ready.
The pink sticky notes are for the primary CTA (Reserving a seat for the workshop), and the green neon ones are for the secondary CTA (Signing up for the newsletter)
The visual design of the landing page
After going through several iterations for the landing page (out of which I deleted a few without realizing that it’s always better to keep all the versions), it started taking shape.
Some decisions I made about the visual style:
- Casual and welcoming
- Photography instead of illustrations
- Clean and Minimalistic
- Balance of text and pictures
After these iterations and innumerable tweaks here and there, the design was ready to be submitted. However, I would not say the final version because there is no such thing as the final. And design is always an iterative process.
What I learned
Copy
If not more, a copy is as important as the visual design itself. It is vital to get it right. Without a good copy, the design would end up losing its meaning. The only way to get it correct is to research the topic deeply. Immerse yourself in the domain you are working on, and talk to your target audience.
Iterations
You can improve design iteratively. What is more important is to get a start. It is easy to fall into the trap of looking at more inspiration and feeling productive (while you are not). My first version was just a skeleton, and then I worked over it iteratively section by section. It worked.
User Interviews
When we pick a design style and language, we make some assumptions. A lot of them end up not being true. How do we know? Only our potential users have these answers. I spoke to a number of people before I started my work; this helped me immensely picking the right thing to work on.
Feedback
Ask for feedback. Talk to other designers, and listen to what they think about your design. They might have ideas you never thought about. There might be obvious usability issues in your design. The more feedback you get, the more opportunity you have to improve. As a designer, we constantly want to learn, deliver, improve and do that in a loop.
I was fortunate to have people like Sahil Pandita and Adarsh Panikkar review my work. They gave actionable and detailed feedback which I could implement.
Conclusion
A huge shoutout to Akshata, Chethan, and Yug for reviewing the assignments, sometimes at midnight 3' or should I say morning 3'? These lounge sessions at 10kdesigners discord were continuous learning for me, as every time I saw one of them reviewing someone’s work, I would correct that particular thing in my project.
Last but not least, while visiting the Anokhi museum, I couldn’t help but appreciate the hard work that goes into this centuries-old art of hand block printing and the dedication from the people who have kept this art alive.
