18Birdies is a startup featuring a golf app that provides course GPS, tee times, scoring, stats, and on-demand golf content.
While at 18Birdies, I was tasked with the new redesign of the marketing website to improve the user experience and visual interface along with increasing click conversions. In the early stages, I collaborated with other UI/UX Designers who were part of an agency that 18Birdies was partnered with.
After the initial launching of the new website, I lead all ongoing design efforts on the website with goals of continuously creating a more intuitive user experience.
In addition to my design responsibilities, I was also in charge of developing the new website using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and WordPress.
The previous website design had issues that hindered the user experience and needed improvements on branding consistency. With the new redesign, some of the goals our team had in mind were:
To kickoff the redesign, I explored possible design solutions by carrying out competitive analysis and researching possible design solutions and inspirations while working with the UI/UX Designers at the agency and key stakeholders to brainstorm ideas and determine the best solutions.
I also spoke with other members of the 18Birdies team who were more knowledgeable about our target audience. This was helpful in providing direction for our designs. It was brought up among stakeholders was that golf is more traditional so it would be more congruent to approach the redesign using photography to display more realistic context and professionalism.
Based on the findings and brainstormed ideas from the previous phase, I began creating rough wireframes focusing on interface layouts that would reflect the goals that were set.
The landing page was a crucial element to achieving our goals and highlighting the benefits of our products. Some of the key improvements to the new landing page included:
Website visitors have the option to download the 18Birdies app via the website by clicking on the download button in the top global navigation. This leads them to this app install page where they would input their phone number and receive a text message with a link to the app page in the App Store or Google Store.
This was an important screen because a good user experience would mean a potential new user. Therefore, my focus was to design an intuitive screen for users by implementing the following:
To continually improve our designs and conversions, we ran testing on our landing page designs. From the results, we discovered that Design #2 yielded higher click conversion rates of the app download buttons.
The changes that I believe led to the increased conversions are following:
For the Business product pricing, I needed to design a pricing page that would highlight the benefits of each plan while making the copy as easy to understand as possible. I made sure to use the various colors within our branding guidelines to differentiate plans while maintaining branding consistency.
The new redesign of the website had various positive impacts on our key performance indicators.
Looking back, here are a few things that I would have liked to invest more focus in or done differently.
I would devote more time into designing for mobile, especially in the earlier stages of the design process.
Although I did experiment with some A/B testing, I believe more A/B testing earlier on would have increased our rate of conversions.
I would try to implement more usability testing throughout the process to further improve the user experience.
