Note: This post is the 7th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Zoe Clelland, who is our Sr. Director, User Experience at WhitePages. She’s been working her tail off over the last 9 months on the launch of the new site. More details below!
Well, would you look at that: a brand new bouncing baby…website. I have to say that until I took a breather to write this blog I hadn’t had a chance to really reflect on exactly how we took the concept of a new “brand” and translated it into an honest to goodness usable website. And not just a website, but a super kick-ass, downright intuitive experience of a site. As the Sr. Director of User Experience here at WhitePages I’ve had lots of opportunity to learn about our users and translate their needs into products and sites but this was a whole new ballgame.
It can be argued that a good user experience is “good” regardless of the brand it represents but it’s clear that some brands inherently ooze good design and superior user interaction. Don’t think for a second that happens because of bubbly designs or cool colors; we knew we would have to take brand attributes and personality characteristics that look good on paper and actually build an experience that represents them. In hindsight, it wasn’t even good enough to just add the “new brand” to a good user experience - the brand, the site design and the overall user experience needed to be ONE thing. So how did we get from there to here? In simple terms, we:
- Defined what the brand is today. Check. (see ‘Repositioning WhitePages’ post)
- Defined what we/users want the brand to be in the future. Check. (see ‘Strategic Brand Platform‘ post)
- Built it into everything we do…
The “building it into everything we do part” is the crux of what moves a brand from an idea or a color or a logo to the emotional/intellectual experience a user has to the website. Whenever we tackle a new design, we deliberate over every search, every page, and every pixel but the fundamental question that guided us for this project was “What would the Brand do?” (WWBD). When we needed to fit a challenging business requirement into the design or integrate new advertisements into the page, or simply “speak” to the user about a feature, we always asked ourselves: WWBD. Let me give you some specifics:
Navigation and Searches
Our existing site has 6 navigational tabs to highlight the various searches and features and it has served us well. But we also know that the vast majority of all searches used are people search, reverse lookup and business search. We want users to be able to easily find whatever they might be looking for but also simplify the design as much as possible. WWBD? Well, in the interest of being intuitive and straightforward we put the high usage search types up front and center on the homepage while all other search types are just one click away on the second tab. The attributes and personality of the brand made the solution seem obvious. As you may already know, we’ve been adding in many new hard-to-find listings and features for our members so we kept the spotlight on these innovative initiatives by dedicating a third tab to membership and listing creation.
Results Page
Users have told us that one of the biggest obstacles to finding the “right” person when conducting a search is getting back too many results. Since we are the best source for people search, we have lots of results to offer and we need to balance that with making the right one easy to pick out. WWBD? The brand guided us to maintain the integrity of our search algorithms and quantity of listings but to overhaul the results pages to maximize “scanability”. We increased white space, removed extra text, and incorporated a row-based designed to get more listings above the “fold”. Essentially, if it didn’t intuitively help the user find the person they were looking for, we didn’t put it in the design. Our Usability Engineer Andrea Lindeman provided a great example of how getting user feedback literally changed the face of the results page in her Usability Testing post earlier this week. That’s just one example of how the brand attribute of intuitive experience allowed us to make user feedback integration a priority.
No Results? How is that on brand?
A core component of our brand is to be the best source for finding and connecting with people. So when we can’t find who the user is looking for, we: a) have truly exhausted every avenue to find the listing for free; b) want to inform the user that there are other options if they really need to get in touch with someone, and c) have only a second to let the user know all of the above. So, that’s right, WWBD? Brand would use friendly, good-humored language to clearly inform the user we don’t have results, and then provide (external) options for complementary services they might be interested in.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how we continue to ensure that the site is free for you by relying on advertising to sponsor the site. While users understand that in order to get the data for free there needs to be ads on the site, we wanted to make sure that it was always clear what was an ad and what was WhitePages content. This makes a big difference not only to our users who need to feel like they can trust us but also to our advertisers who can be better integrated and offer contextually relevant information and services. Ingrid Michelsen, our Directory of Ad Strategy, will talk more about how we’re monetizing the new site later on in the Brand Series.
So, that’s the process (in a very small nutshell) that brought us to this day. The main take away for me is that when, as a company, you develop brand attributes that include superior user experience, the brand itself becomes a driver for a better product. It really is a new era for all of us here at WhitePages, as well as all the customers who rely on us to stay connected. There is lots of work yet to be done and we’ll be spending many more months fine tuning the brand and the site. We’re automatically re-directing about 10% of our traffic to the new site for now so if you end up on the purple site and want to head over to the new site, just click the “Try the new WhitePages” graphic in the top left of any page. Check it out, or take the tour, and tell us what you think!
And feel free to ask me questions via the comment section below. Comments, criticisms, suggestions…bring it on!
Zoe
Other Brand Series Posts:
The Series Introduction: WhitePages Site Redesign
Market Research and Analysis
Strategic Brand Platform
Defining our Visual Identity
Explaining Branding to Employees
Usability Testing
Related posts:
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Yikes, aren’t you going to add e-mails anymore? When we’re using you to find an address, we need the e-mail, too! Otherwise it’s a hindrance… Sure, we can go to your “zip codes” area, but it doesn’t give the breakdown for different areas in a big city. It just lists all the zip codes in that city.
With your old format (which I thought was perfect, but this is ok), the zip was included for each entry. Please go back to including it!!!!!! Otherwise we have to do another search somewhere else to find the zip code for a specific address, and that takes way too much time.
Hi Darlene
Rest assured that we still will be providing both emails and ZIP codes. WhitePages members will still be able to add email and cell to their listings and you’ll be able to contact those users via email. When you find the listing you want just click on the name and you’ll the full listing, including ZIP. Thanks!
Nice new design, but your grammar is off: it should be “Whom are you looking for?” Some say that the use of “whom,” though correct in this context, is too stuffy. Let me put in a plug for stuffiness!
Cheers
Fair comment, Russell! One of the personality traits of our brand is to be friendly in tone; we want to communicate in a more conversational manner with our users and so we decided to forgo the “whom”. But we still appreciate your dedication to good grammar
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
Gary, it’s great to hear that these posts were helpful to you, that’s exactly what we were going for! There are still two more posts in the Brand Building series so watch for those over the next several week and rest assured we will continue to share our experiences with this and other product launches in the future. Thanks for reading!
how many user personas did you utilize in your process?
Stevie B,
We are lucky to have a large (by tech industry standards) user experience team here at WP which allows us to go beyond personas, into much deeper details of our user base. In a nutshell, we start from the higher order mental model in terms of how/why users search and then cross tab those behaviors with more granular segments based on frequency of use. Hope that helps!
Hey Z,
I got what you said, i would’ve appreciated it in a more-user friendly language. Funny how all that UX jargon boils down to “simplify and make it bigger.” Beats the previous purple incarnation.
I appreciate how your UX team is different, as you have vast amounts of data to mine. Is your process beyond creating envisionments, etc? Its interesting how everybody is doing it a little differently.
How often do you plan on releasing?
I’m not sure I would say that we are “beyond” any particular methodology but because of the breadth of our data and our user base, we do tend to take a more granular approach to use cases and user types. Luckily, we have a usability lab on-site and dedicated resources focused on researching the market and our customers – what a luxury, I know!
In terms of releases, now that we are using Ruby on Rails we are able to tweak features and UI much more frequently so it won’t be uncommon to see weekly updates to the site. Thanks for your interest!
Would it be possible to have a “classic view” option which switches to the former “purple” look? I find the updated look to be very hard to read. It is especially difficult when I am attempting to find a person based on others in his or her household as this section is now frequently shortened into dots. Needless to say it’s very frustrating when I have to click on an ad to display the household names in full and find that the ad just clicked is not the person I was looking for. I found the older skin to be very user friendly and clearly displayed all of the information I required at first glance.
Thanks for the feedback, Ben. You bring up a couple great points about the readability and display of household members and I’m happy to report that we will be addressing both those issues in the next month or so. In terms of a “classic view” we know how hard it is to get accustomed to a new site but our goal is to make the green site even better than the purple. We think that if you give it just a little more time while we work out the kinks, you’ll never want to go back!
Sounds like you need to invite Ben to the lab Zoe!
Do you think you make a mistake by “flipping the switch” on the new site instead deploying the changes incrementally? For every Ben Beeny that comments there are 100s that don’t – those are the users you lose permanently.
For example, you could have phased in the new colors over a couple of weeks. Its a bit much to expect your users to just “get it”…. but I assume you’ve researched that.
How did you incorporate user feedback in the original design concepts? From a prior post it seemed that Visual came up with design concepts and one was chosen; when did UX get involved?
I see what Ben is saying; looking at the screencaps above, the purple version’s colored bars and tabs are clear visual call-to-actions…. the new version is all beige, the eye wanders.
The copy changes are confusing as well… “people search” became “who are you looking for;” they’re different questions. “People search” sounds like a large, in-depth search, whereas “who are you looking for” is a question that would pop up in a person-person, real-life situation, i.e. if you lost your kid at the mall. Or if you were wandering around the town and a cop spots you and is wondering what you’re up to.
First impressions count. I’m wondering where the brand character comes out?
My goodness we have a run on Stevie posts this week! All good questions. In terms of a slow rollout versus “flipping the switch”, we took a measured approach by having an open beta period for 2 months where we allowed users some time to get used to the new site and gather lots of feedback about the changes. I certainly think that iterative changes over a longer period of time is a valid approach as well and has proven positive for lots of other sites but didn’t meet our objectives as well this time around.
In terms of elements that we removed, language we changed etc, the goal of this rebranding, as with all of them, was to meet a set of attributes and simplicity that has many moving parts. For example, in terms of search context, users tend to use the search form for that information and the reiteration of the search context was redundant and unnecessary. We researched these types of decisions very thoroughly and while nothing will make everyone happy all the time, we have found that the changes you mention have had an overall positive effect on the market perception of the site and the usability.
You also removed the search results verbiage… i.e. “16 results matching XXX in XXX” became “16 results.”
Was the former removed in testing? Having the added info reminds you of what you were searching for. Its not like there’s not enough room in the design. Is it good UX to remove context?
WP coudn’t be better than this. It’s a free site that’s so helpful to many users. Surely other things that are helpful to make it even useful are for discussions now. Kudos to you all guys for this endeavor! cheerio
Thanks for the positive comment Bluer, we appreciate it!