A homepage for a product is a sacred space. It’s where the first interaction between a potential user and your brand occurs. It’s where you’re given your first opportunity to communicate who you are as a company to a potential customer. The homepage encapsulates your identity in one page. And in 2021, I was given the opportunity to rethink and redesign Ladder’s homepage.
Frankly, the inception of this project came from a desire to modernize our homepage with more animations and moments of delight to compete with our competitors. We saw that our competitors have been modernizing their homepage through dynamic animations (scroll to animate, autoplay animation, etc.), and thus wanted to keep up.
<aside> ⚠️ I quickly realized that this wasn’t an ideal way to start a project as we already had a solution in mind (e.g. animations). More on this later.
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The proposed success metric for this project was to see how much more traffic we are activating with the redesign. Specifically, how many more people get a quote after visiting the homepage? In other words, does this new traffic have more confidence to purposefully go through the application than our old homepage?
Old experience
New experience
As mentioned, there was a specific focus on modernizing the page with animations. I wanted to start the project, however, by taking a step back to see all the possible opportunities to improve our homepage. I advocated the necessity of research at this stage to my teammates (PM, specifically) and was given a week to do some quick user testing and research.
Through Usertesting.com I conducted both a general assessment and competitive analysis of our homepage. Some takeaways from these tests include:
Get started button received mixed responses