thefutur.com

The Problem

At the time, our homepage functioned more as a content hub than a focused landing page. Although we did feature products, most sections directed visitors to content, and only one small section was dedicated to the membership group.

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How might we…

Highlight our new membership offerings and encourage visitors to sign up for free, while still including our other products and relevant content in a clear and intuitive way?

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The Solution

To introduce the new membership tiers, we redefined the purpose of our home page and redesigned it to be a product-focused landing page.

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Improving Page Nav

We started the process by examining our existing IA and primary navigation. What we discovered was that our homepage was effectively directing visitors away from the page and towards content pages—the opposite of what we now needed. We also learned that our current nav was too complicated complex (see the wall of nav links pictured above).

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There is no shortage of great SaaS landing pages to study, but our product ecosystem is different. I like to think of it as a membership marketplace. I partnered with our COO, Ben Burns, and the two of us held our own competitive audit and compared notes. From those insights, we made several iterations of wireframes for the new page.

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Rolling out our design system

This redesign also provided an opportunity to start rolling out our newly minted design system. Though still a work in progress, Ben and I decided that the homepage would be an excellent place to begin.

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Retrospective

How my work contributed

As the design director for this project I led the charge for narrowing the focal point of our homepage (see: membership) and take the first real step toward a systematic approach to design.

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Critical skill needed

A keen eye. With the introduction of new components and design language, it was crucial to take the time to check font weights and spacing, even though other parts of our site retained the deprecated styles.

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Biggest obstacle

Development time. We’re a small, but mighty team capable of doing big things. Redesigning a homepage may sound straightforward, but when it involves backend membership tier management (and lots of modals), time can slip away faster than you would like.