Branding Workshop

Before creating the new branding or website, we had to establish a new branding direction. The goals of the branding workshop were

• Uncover the essence of what differentiates EN in the minds of our customers

• Create a consistent strategy which will help in delivering more scalable business, replicable processes, and greater productivity

I created 4 different activities, designed to help the audience think critically about our current branding, and what they wanted in the new branding. I conducted 2 separate workshops, one with the Executive team including the CEO and CTO, and the other with 12 employees who we felt understood the culture of the company.

We found a few points consistent with both teams:

• The current branding looks outdated and we should have a modern look consistent with our tech and goals

• There is a perception among potential users that EN is hard to use

  • However this this because we have a more complete software

  • Competitors’ software may seem more user friendly, but do not have all the functionality that we do

• We want to appear friendly, but direct and to the point

  • Like our software, we want to remove all the “fluff”

The Brand Strategy

We had originally planned a complete rebrand, changing first the logo, then typography and colors, and finally, the website. However, after evaluating our branding plan, we realized that would not be practical. Employee Navigator has become a recognizable name in the insurance business and has established a lot of trust with its customer base. If we were to change our logo, the hundreds of carriers and brokers who have our logo and colors on their websites, marketing materials, and demo videos would have to make the switch with us. It would become an expensive and time consuming endeavor, possibly losing visibility and cause confusion in the process. Instead, we decided a partial rebranding, to simply modernize our image.

The website then became our main priority with two goals in mind:

• Increase our customer conversion rate

• Increase hiring and recruitment

Style Guide

We created a style guide including patterns, colors, typography, and icons that are used consistently throughout the public site. They have also begun to be used in marketing materials and in the app.

Themes from the logo

We took a theme from the logo and name: navigation. On the site we use many pointed shapes to indicate direction and guide the user through the page.

I also created a fading triangle pattern that is used around the site as a texture and to add interest to some of our pages. This pattern has also become a main branding component, and is used throughout our social media.

Product Icons

Employee Navigator provides many functions that were difficult to find distinct icons for. To avoid cluttering the pages, we identified Employee Navigator’s 7 main products, and created abstract, pixel perfect icons that would stand out and be immediately recognizable as ours.

Graphics

We wanted to showcase our software without using screenshots that would quickly go out of date and would be hard to read. Instead, I created 12 graphics that mimicked our UI, but were simple enough to understand their functionality at a glance. This way, we remove all the clutter from the page that detracts from the feature we want to highlight. We also would not have to update them as frequently as screenshots because we are creating an approximation of the UI only, not the exact look.

Creating a Custom CMS

The front-end dev and I worked together to create a custom CMS with Wordpress that uses components we design. This way we could create templates and reusable components to create pages, instead of having to code a page from scratch each time. Once we created all the components we created, the Marketing team could insert all the copy they had written, and I could upload graphics. We now don’t need to rely on the engineering team at all to update the site.

A few pages I designed

Conclusion

After launching the new site, the number of visitors has increased by 32%. We are also able to update the site much more quickly, without relying on the engineering team. We can create a new product page in approximately 2 days, whereas before, there were typos that were 8 years old because we couldn’t spare the time or resources to correct them.

This was the first professional project I worked on after college. I learned an infinite amount of knowledge from it, not just about design, but about considerations for cost and effects to a business, best practices for collaborating with development and content writers, and advocating for design to executives and team members.

What I would do differently

While all the slanted shapes are indicators of Employee Navigator’s name and unique to our brand, they made the components much less modular. It was the only shape we used when it should have been regulated to a few components. It was difficult to design for, and there were multiple occasions where we wanted to add a background color but couldn’t because it wouldn’t fit with the slants.

Instead of only using shades of green and blue, I wish we had added one more light, neutral color to add some variety. It was difficult to add a color that would match green, blue, and orange, and I wish we had given that palette more thought from the beginning.