Aprise
Redesigning Aprise.org
My Role:
User Research, Design strategy, Visual design, Usability testing
Team:
Three designers
Tools:
Figma, Lucidchart
Duration:
3 week sprint
Overview
Aprise is a company made to help small and medium businesses find and apply for government economic incentives.
For this project, we were tasked with redesigning Aprise.org to smooth out the customer journey and help users navigate through the site to easily find the information they need to help their small and medium businesses. Our goal was to capture customer emails through user interaction.
We also wanted to redesign the site to help users easily understand what kind of services Aprise offers and why it is unique and beneficial.
Problem
The current site was not getting enough customers for the company. Our client wanted us to redesign the Aprise website to increase customer engagement and give their site the ability to reach out to a broader range of people, specifically tech start ups. Several usability test participants voiced concerns regarding the trustworthiness of the original site.
Key issues we wanted to address:
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The site currently does not appeal to modern audiences
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The site does not effectively convey the value of service
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Users were having trouble navigating the site and finding the information they needed
Initial Research
We started our research process by trying to understand the pain points of the current site. To do this, we conducted usability tests on the original Aprise.org.
All of our usability test participants had difficulty understanding the service that Aprise provided. In addition, they found the navigation to be confusing and even had trouble finding how to request more information.
User
To learn more about our users, we conducted user interviews with local small business owners to answer the questions “Who are the users of Aprise?” and “what do they need?”, and came to the conclusion that:
Users needed a simple and inexpensive way to find and apply for government incentives. Ideally, they would want an online platform that offers both easy to understand information and a quick and easy application system to get these benefits. Seeing as the customers are business owners, if the site seemed even a little bit disreputable, they would not trust the service with their business information.
We wanted to learn through our user interviews what kind of struggles small and medium business owners faced when trying to find government incentives to help their business grow.
In addition to the user needs, the client also wanted to expand their target users to also include tech start-ups, young entrepreneurs, as well as small business owners who need financial support but don’t have enough information to find or apply for them.
Key Issue #1
The site currently does not appeal to modern audiences
In addition to having a modern feel, we also wanted our users to feel safe trusting us with their private business information and so we researched other financial service sites to make sure our site would feel credible, and trustworthy.
Color palette- We chose to keep the range of blues that was used on the original site as blue is often a color used on financial sites to convey a calming and trustworthy tone. We also decided on an orange for our call to action color to provide contrast and make the buttons stand out. Originally we considered a red color but additional research found that color to be a bit too alarming.
Font- We wanted our users to be able to easily and comfortably scan our site so we chose Open Sans, variating between regular and semi-bold for our headers and subtitles.
Illustrations- We decided to use illustrations for our design to give a minimalist and modern style that would appeal to the client’s ideal user group (tech startups). The use of illustrations also limited any type of biases as they were neutral and ambiguous. The illustrations encouraged users to insert themselves as future customers of Aprise.
Key Issue #2
The site does not effectively convey the value of service
We reworded everything so that when users visit the site, they would understand the key services that Aprise provides. This clear communication made the design even more trustworthy and professional. Some content on the original site was left out of the redesign because they came off as less trustworthy during the usability test.
Redesign
Original
This was confusing to a lot of our usability test participants. Many assumed “1, 2, 3” referred to the order of steps but in reality they are not of any order.
Redesign
Original
This “Resources” section was located toward the end of the page and made many usability test participants feel that the entire site is just a marketing page for the CEO’s books. We chose to remove this as we feared this would reduce the company’s trust and credibility.
Key Issue #3
Users were having trouble navigating the site and finding the information they needed
We turned the site from a single page site to a multi page site with headers carefully named to allow users to quickly navigate the site to find exactly what they need. This way, users wouldn't have to scroll endlessly on the page to find what they need.
Original
Redesign
We also felt that having the phone number at the header bar felt too pushy and commercial.
We wanted to give the user a little bit of time to learn more about Aprise and when they are ready to sign up, there’s a “Contact Us” header where our information can be found.
Prototype
Next Steps and Reflections
We presented our work to our stakeholders and received positive feedback on our prototype that emphasized our users’ needs while also being designed to attract our clients’ target audience. Our next steps would be to look into the best design practices to incorporate a live chat widget in a way that would greatly benefit small and medium business owners without hindering the usability of the rest of the site.
This project allowed us to better understand the difficulty of being a small or medium business owner. Especially for those trying to find and apply for financial support through Government websites. This project was really inspiring and we hope that more people will be willing to lend a helping hand like Aprise.
Usability Testing
All of our usability test participants were able to accomplish all of the tasks that previous participants had trouble with on the old site. In addition, the usability test participants on the redesign showed significantly better understanding of the services provided by Aprise.