
During my internship process for BlockApps — a blockchain company — I was challenged by the CTO to peek into their current website and deliver a short review.
My findings pushed the company to a full website revamp.
Besides the need to fix critical issues like the poor information architecture strategy, lack of UI consistency, slow loading times, bad document outline and HTML errors, we also wanted to have better content targeting not only potential clients but also potential developers.
The website was put together by developers during the early days and the company got very busy building the core product STRATO, the website was too technical for a common man to understand, lacked content and call-to-action to invite the user to engage in a discovery journey through the website. The design was minimalist to a point where it was hard to understand what this company was all about. The function was following from here and it was clear to me that no planning has been done in choosing colors, fonts, illustrations, content and target audience.

All the main menu items were hidden inside a hamburger menu (while less important ones were being displayed at the top bar), there were no visible explanation of what the website was about nor any call-to-action to "grab the user by the hand".
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Same title and description on all pages;
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No keyword strategy has been defined;
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No sitemap nor robots.txt;
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Duplicated pages with no canonical links resulting in no-indexation;
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No friendly URL's;
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No relevant content for the user;
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Bad document outline;
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Wrong usage of semantic markup;
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Most important menu items were being hidden inside a Hamburger menu;
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Images were not compressed nor resized;
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No titles per section making the user to easily feel lost;
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Illustrations were not aligned
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Most images had no alternative text;
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Ranking hierarchy on titles was not being respected;
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Lack of consistency and standards on the UI;
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Bad SERP's positioning for relevant long tail terms;
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Etc.
It was time to collect information about the company, clients, industry, etc.
I was new to the company and so I ran a series of short stakeholder interviews with the staff in order to learn more about the company's culture and to understand the reasons behind their choice for the website.
I also talked with sales, project managers, marketing and management teams (CEO, CTO, COO) about their vision, mission, market positioning, clients portfolio, etc.:
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Who is the target?
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What do we know about them?
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What might they be looking for?
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What should we communicate?
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What are we offering?
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How will they find us?
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What do we want them to do on the website?
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How will we measure success?
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Which keywords are important for us?
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What is our company positioning?
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Who are the competitors?
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How do we differentiate from them?
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What are our biggest strengths and weakness?
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Which channels are we actively using?
Note: During the research, I felt I needed to talk to more of our clients:
How did they find us?
What made them choose the present design?
What do they most value in the company?
What are their biggest concerns?
Etc.
We were able to create a primary (Jenny: potential client)
Jenny has this new product to develop and had a very bad experience with her last development company and wants to search for a blockchain company. She starts by searching online for “Blockchain companies”. She found some results, entered the website and tries briefly to understand their potential. She favorites the ones she got interested in. She discussed with her team. She contacted those names and revisited the favorites. She saw BlockApps website and got engaged by the well-synthesized information they had on the homepage. She started reading a case study and clicked on “continue reading”. She finished the reading and clicked on Talk to Sales and contacts BlockApps.
The objective was to build a content-driven website that could engage our target audience while being much more SEO friendly.
Blockchain is a formidable space to get involved in. The result is a core group who are passionately involved. But to the average person or designer, outside of this bubble, it’s really hard to get excited. For some this is absolutely new concept. There’s no easy way to get involved. The industry has a bad reputation as being a get rich quick scheme. Terms like Dapps, Smart contracts and multimode are overcomplicated for people looking from outside. I wanted to make blockchain technology accessible to the mainstream. The first step is removing the jargon. I’ve always encouraged no jargon policy while building applications.
"Nobody cares what software Netflix runs on. Users only care about what a product lets them do. Focus on value, not jargon"
We want to get developers, executives from companies, sales team and a lot more people outside the blockchain world get involved, so we need to make products that are really simple to use and understand, in layman’s terms. I often get a blank look when I tell my family and friend about blockchain. The market is filled with people who are part of the industry and who understand. But its a hard and impenetrable concept for many. The market is full of people inside the bubble, people who understand. But to outsiders, it’s an unwelcoming, impenetrable bubble.
"Only way was to be ruthless and radically simple with everything on the website so everyone can understand"




The team page is one of the most searched by potential clients and potential employees.
The old team page lacked a level of humaness and organization sturcture. My website user research showed 90% of the users who visited the page visited “team” page. They were searching to get an idea to what kind of a company they are going to deal with, whether the company is reliable, how long it has been in the industry, how are its people associated to the industry. This is why it was necessary to have a nice “Team page”.




I wanted the “Team” page shows a level of humanness in the services the company provides, reinforcing the credibility of the company, encouraging the visitor to start trusting the company and showcases team’s talent and skills, all these factors in turn contribute to making the company a memorable one in the minds of the potential, as well as existing customers.
I also wanted to build a lasting relationship between the company and the clients coming in to check the website


TESTING
QUICK TEST USING EyeQuant
Eyequant is an Artificial Intelligence tool that allows us to test the visual impact of any design instantly without eye-tracking devices.


The tool was also used to pre-validate design aspects like engagement, clarity, and excitingness.
A/B Test Results
The new design significantly outperformed the original, and delivered 42% more signups for demo!
REFLECTIONS
The new design instantly helped the company with 3 huge clients. At that time the only way the company could survive and make profits was by building products for external clients, secondary being developer sign ups. But the old design was too technical which only attracted developers to the company. I wanted to attract enterprises towards the product so the company can sell licenses which would geneate huge income. The new design had separate enterprise section with use cases, stories and partners which helped enterprises and people outside the blockchain bubble understand what the company was about and how its product could help them.