In a highly competitive landscape, Karbon needed a revamped website to improve SEO health, better educate prospects and convert more visitors.

Mission

Karbon is the top-rated practice management platform for accounting firms. In 2022, our team of two designers and two engineers set out to redesign Karbon’s marketing website to better educate visitors, stand out from competitors, and increase lead to opportunity conversion rates.

Impact

In three months we increased the visual and structural consistency across the entire site experience, with a new brand expression, systematised components that lowered maintenance overhead and laid the foundations to scale SEO pages. I also designed a series of experiments to AB tests and optimise the conversion rate of the home page and sign up flow.

My Contribution

Project Planning
UX & UI Design
Prototyping & User Testing
Brand Identity

Background and my role

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.

Planning the redesign strategy and scope

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.

Post it notes showing ideas to improve Karbon's signup flow conversion

A refreshed brand expression to cut through a sea of sameness

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...

User interface modal Karbon's user interface with a calendar to book a call

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.

User interface modal Karbon's user interface with a calendar to book a call

Monthly AB tests to optimise landing pages and improve sign-up conversion

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.

User interface modal Karbon's user interface with a calendar to book a call

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.

Post it notes showing ideas to improve Karbon's signup flow conversion
Post it notes showing ideas to improve Karbon's signup flow conversion
Post it notes showing ideas to improve Karbon's signup flow conversion

Challenges faced, lessons learned, and next steps...

Applying productive pressure is critical to keeping projects moving

As designers, attention to detail is in our DNA. And when we have a vision for what something could be we don't like to compromise. But in reality, deadlines can't be ignored and applying productive pressure is critical to getting things done. Perfectionism is best left at the door.

Usability testing to make the marketing website more effective

Post-launch, I ran a research study with accountants to get user feedback, uncover problems, discover opportunities, and learn about our audience to make the marketing website more effective. I ran two usability tests to evaluate way-finding and content effectiveness, and to evaluate conversion flow effectiveness. The insights were used to make copy and image enhancements over the following months.