In 2022, I was the sole Senior Brand and Marketing Designer at Karbon, responsible for shaping Karbon’s brand expression and enhancing the user experience across all digital marketing platforms. A major project was revamping Karbon's marketing website, which attracts 50,000 monthly visitors, primarily accounting firm owners assessing Karbon’s B2B practice management SaaS platform.
Over the years, the marketing site had morphed into an amalgamation of various generations of brand expressions, lacking consistency and the necessary structure for scale. Under the guidance of a new Design Director, I contributed to a brand refresh and redesigned the website product pages for better consistency and scalability.
As a small team balancing numerous projects a complete redesign was frankly out of the question. We needed to work smart, and narrow our focus on the highest impact areas while laying the necessary foundations for future and fast improvements.
The project objectives were:
Make it clear on arrival exactly what Karbon is and how it benefits accounting firms.
Help prospects self-service answers to their questions about the product, services, and pricing.
Provide a seamless sign-up experience (by way of booking a sales demo and/or starting a free trial).
Assess and improve SEO health of key pages where needed.
We began by outlining the site's scope and experience, focusing on a complete overhaul of content, visuals, and interaction for primary pages, while adopting a templated approach for secondary and tertiary pages, tailored as needed. Regular weekly meetings with our developers ensured synchronisation on the project plan, addressing dependencies and blockers, discussing solutions, and clarifying weekly priorities for the team.
In the early stages, I spent some time planning the site content and information architecture at low fidelity, focusing on finding the right amount of information density and layering in navigation elements to provide useful browsing pathways for our audience and their pain-points.
From here, I levelled up fidelity of the primary pages and pulled together a simple Figma prototype to test the content experience and core user flows, looping in Marketing stakeholders for feedback along the way.
At Karbon, we think of accountants as the unsung heroes of the global economy who have long been under-appreciated. But accounting software brands all look and feel the same. Back in the day, business software used to be hard and complicated and in the early 2000s some smart people made it friendly, approachable, and casual. Fast forward to now and so many tech brands—especially accounting tech—either feel cold and sterile or casual and cartoonish. Basically, they all look and feel the same.
We believe in challenging the status quo. So while working on the website, through a series of creative bursts, myself and the Director of Brand and Marketing Design explored a handful of concepts of what the next evolution of Karbon’s brand expression could be...
Accounting firms need solid but flexible foundations to keep up with today’s challenges. Karbon is practice management for a more connected firm. It isn't top-down or bottom-up. It's everything connected all the time in all directions.
With this in mind, we narrowed in on our final brand expression to be one that emulates strong but flexible connectivity. It applies principles built on a strong foundation of grid, typography, and a controlled colour palette. This strong foundation is offset by the fluidity of graphic elements forming connections. Shapes that represent the connected elements of a thriving firm—people, tasks, systems, documents, and data.
Over the course of my time in the Marketing team, one of my KPIs was to form hypotheses and design experiments aimed at increasing user engagement and conversion rates for the marketing site pages and primary sign-up flow.
The objectives were to improve:
key landing page engagement, including SEO product competitor pages.
rate of clicks on the primary button, ‘Get Started’.
rate of conversion through each step of the sign up flow, with the aim of qualifying a lead for the Sales team, driving users to book a Sales demo and/or sign up for a self-provisioned trial.
For example, I designed two variants of the marketing site home page to test which would entice more visitors to scroll further and engage with the content more. Visitors who landed on the challenger variant were three times as likely to reach the bottom of the page, and it had an engagement rate of 80.9% in comparison to 60.7% of the control.
Ready to take our refreshed brand expression for a spin, I explored visual possibilities for key website moments such as our home page and product benefit page. I focused on levelling up visual treatment for UI elements and product imagery, while word-smithing headline copy to complement the content—because words are design too.
After sharing for feedback, I collaborated with two developers to translate our new brand components to web and moved on to developing key page templates and reusable components for scalability. Ready to roll out production, I sourced customer photography, designed product imagery for ten product pages, and coordinated with our in-house copy-writer to populate written content via a CMS to stage and test.
