Outsmart
Building a software as a service
Explored the adventurous life of building a startup company to see how far we could take a few ideas we had around online marketing and how to improve that for small to medium sized enterprises.
It all started as a side project and with many hours of iterations, feedback collection and hard work to find product marketfit, we ended up with a complete SaaS solution for marketing analytics.
- Timeline
- 13 months
- Role
- Product design
- Front-end framework
- Client
- Outsmart
- Industry
- Marketing analytics
- Competitive benchmarking
The challenge
Provide simplified data
One part of the work was to figure out how we could provide actionable insights in a more clean and simple way.
Each week and in the end of a month there was actionable insight sent out via email. The challenge was to provide a design that was delightful and simple enough for anyone to understand data.
We started to design for desktop publishing first, as if you would print your report and later we translated that into a dynamic PDF creator and finally to e-mail communication.
The process
Focus on e-mail communication
Once we had a good understanding of what type of data we would track and report, the next natural step was to design the medium that would be used in a daily communication.
The concept was to make it quick and enjoyable over a cup of coffee in the morning to read, process and understand the daily or weekly progress in an instant.
Our focus was on self-service, à la plug and play to get going, and we wanted to highlight simplicity and a users ability to setup and request any information needed in seamless and easy way all by themselves.
Branding
Working with color schemes
Because we were tracking data from different marketing sources and to make it easier to target and differentiate these specific strategies, we decided to play with color schemes.
We also used a playful and abstract language in illustrations and other graphical elements to give a hint of what to expect when using the software. While we kept screen captures real.
The website
To use conversion centered design
The next part in the design process was to work on the website. This would be a pure marketing channel and we decided to focus on conversion centered design for the layout.
First we grouped our data from our different marketing sources into landing pages based on usage and target audience.
This to make it easier to target specific keywords and to help potential customers to understand what we offered based on their daily work.
User interface
Avoid information overload
Since the focus was on how to provide clear, simple and useful insights as a constant feedback, week over week, we tried to keep the user interface for agents clean and less cluttered.
We also understood that many smaller companies was less advanced in their marketing efforts and they wanted a more simple way to get updated around their marketing efforts.
Design language
How to get visitors to take action
Once we have figured out content strategy of the website, we divided each page into a few predefined sections, which all used their own unique design language to emphasize conversion.
This helped us to mix and match sections based on content and target audience for the page. With persuasive writing and consistent message, we could get visitors to take action.
The result
Extensive amount of templates
Everything in this project was built from scratch based on hypothesis and assumptions about potential customers and business ideas. It started as a powerpoint and slowly increased.
Even if we started with a minimal viable product and slowly iterated those ideas and concepts to find market fit, it became en extended amount of design and work to finalize.
- 23
- PDF Templates
- 54
- Email Types
- 216
- HTML Templates
- 4
- Unique Systems
