How UX writing and content strategy solved a complex problem to delight both stakeholders and users.
Project background
The Serious Type is a nonprofit agency aiming to unite creatives and share meaningful creative works on and off the platform. This 8-week phase was a continuation of work started by a previous team. We created an experience to encourage users to create a profile and join the community.
Throughout this project, we learned about significant problems with our design ideas. With limited time, we focused on how we might make the experience easier for the user and help them want to stay on the site and share their work. Content strategy chose to put our energy toward landing page improvements.
My role
Lead Content Strategist and UX Writer: I led a team of 3 apprentices through an 8-week design phase to develop product voice and tone, improve site navigation and efficiently collaborate with the other teams on the project. I wrote copy for the landing page headers, subheaders and microcopy.
Team
Content Strategy/UX Writing
UX Design
UX Research
Product Strategy
Development/Engineering
Tools
Figma/FigJam
Slack
Notion
Problems to address
We identified 2 key problems during this phase of the project:
Users arrived at The Serious Type’s website unsure of what the site is and what value they would gain from visiting the site. If users didn’t understand the landing page, then they would be unlikely to stay on the site to post, share and engage with the community.
Stakeholders were unsure of their vision and target audience.
Users and needs
Because the target audience was uncertain, we chose a user base:
Creative adults, aged 30-40 years old who want to share their creative work and bring attention to causes they care about.
This site needed to be different from existing platforms — it is based on social causes, not just general social networking. We hypothesized this would be important to users.
Pictured is an image of the current landing page of theserioustype.org.
The image included shows our initial low-fidelity idea of what this site might look like.
The work
We set out to understand specifically what was working and what wasn’t with the existing website.
My team conducted a content audit of the current website and observed:
Site hierarchy was missing. There was unclear navigation and the overall site lacked impactful descriptions of what a user could expect to find on the site.
Users agreed with our content audit findings:
100% of users reported the site was confusing and it was unclear what they were seeing.
One user stated: “I am just trying to figure out what this website does. Like what this organization does…Is it like an agency or is it like the marketplace for creators?”
We collaborated with the design team to show our ideas to improve the experience:
Developed site hierarchy for users to easily see what The Serious Type has to offer and to easily find what they need.
Showed clean visuals and highlight community projects to inspire and encourage users to stay on the site and join the community.
Updated descriptions of the spaces a user might want to learn about
This image shows the description of The Serious Type. The cards are interactive and show descriptions of each of the sections.
Next iterations
We made several changes to reflect early feedback from users.
We reimagined how the landing page would look and function. Our goal this round was to make the site easy to navigate, easy to read and interesting enough that users would want to view the different areas of the site and then become a member. Based on stakeholder feedback, I:
Wrote captivating text in the banner image and in the body copy.
Added the 4 most important features the stakeholders requested (studio, gallery, experiences and forum).
Drafted brief descriptions that would invite the user to explore the new sections.
While we thought we had a strong solution with improved details and descriptions, it turned out 60% of users were still confused. One user stated:
“I'm trying to figure out, like what the value for me. As an artist is like, what am I getting out of it? Like is my work on display somewhere? Is this like a new place for me to share my work? Or is this kind of a social experiment? So I'm still like, I feel like I should know, what this website is doing right here. And then like, why? Like why it exists?”
This image shows the final iteration of the landing page and includes sections of the site with descriptions of the informaiton that can be found.
Final iterations on the landing page
After a final round of stakeholder and user feedback, we gained more insights into what was still missing.
Stakeholder: Create an “experience” for users. Take users on a “journey” and invite them into the world of The Serious Type. Stakeholders liked bold imagery, limited text and a lot of color.
We added bold colors, used a video as the banner image and expanded the copy at the top of the page to better explain the purpose of The Serious Type.
User: Needed to know why they should post their work on the site. A commonly asked questions was “is it safe?” Users also wanted to know what value they get from posting on the site and sharing their creative work with others.
We added “tabs” to the landing page with brief explanations of the content in each section.
The “studio” and “salon” tabs had an invitation for users to join the community to become members. Content in these sections can only be accessed by current members.
Constraints: Determining color palette was quite difficult as branding and marketing strategy was not developed prior to starting this phase. We did our best to think about the future vision for The Serious Type and how accessible the buttons and other areas of the screen would be.
This image details the “about us” section of the website. It includes images of the mission, vision statement and The Serious Type team members.
Final iterations on the “about us” page
We recognized the need to add another page in order to meet both stakeholder needs and user needs.
In order to balance the stakeholders’ desire for users to “experience the site,” we needed to add an “about” page to the experience.
The stakeholders specifically wanted minimal text on the landing page, while users needed some information to understand the experience. We found a compromise by creating another page that would still add visual interest, interactivity and more information to allow users the choice to learn more about The Serious Type.
Key features of this page:
Bold imagery
Statements about The Serious Type such as “our story”, mission and vision.
Spotlight on the team involved in creating The Serious Type
Stakeholder feedback:
The stakeholders were overall pleased with our work. One mentioned:
“I like that the words are fun and playful but it still shows that we want to get to work to create a better world".”
We weren’t able to test the final design with users, but it was exciting to see the enthusiasm from the stakeholders.
Summary of the 8 week phase
What was the impact of our work and did we accomplish our goals?
We worked to balance our efforts to hit the trifecta of stakeholder needs met, user needs met and constraints. Although the new platform wasn’t live at the end of the 8 week design phase, we are confident that it will launch within the next 8-12 weeks.
User needs: In general, users were able to navigate the landing page and were able to be mostly successful the tasks we developed with other areas of the new platform.
Stakeholder needs: Stakeholders were thrilled with the bold color choice and the use of creative imagery.
Constraints: We had limitations in time, in scope and in branding and marketing strategy. Overall, within those constraints we were successful in creating a landing page that shared just enough information. We have a platform to host our work and the cost is something The Serious Type can afford to maintain long term.
Recommendations going forward:
Solidify branding and marketing: the current logo and color palette does not have much brand recognition, but we presented a strong case for the importance of including this in future designs and site updates.
Tell the story of The Serious Type: The landing page is the first page users see and need to understand who The Serious Type is and why they should commit their time and effort into joining. The Serious Type does incredible work and the site should let that shine.
Know the target audience: The Serious Type was originally developed as a social networking platform for youth. As the platform has evolved, it was built with an older audience in mind. Some of the future features may appeal to an older audience, but the goal for the next 6-12 months is to build brand recognition and a core base of users before expanding to include a younger audience.
Key takeaways
At the end of it all, there were 2 important lessons that I took from this experience.
Stakeholder alignment is really important so we can understand the goals for the final product. This was a challenge, but we asked questions along the way to gain clarity from the stakeholders. When ideas contradicted user needs, we were able to advocate for the user.
Research early and often to understand key demographic and user needs. We didn’t have much to work with in the beginning and needed to learn as much about our user and their experience with our site quickly in order to build, test and iterate on new designs. We were lucky to have a large group of willing participants, but I learned that research is vital to building the right thing, for the right people, at the right time.