It’s amazing what can happen when you take the time to understand your clients communication problems. What began as a fairly simple infographic became a complete redesign of the clients website.

Context

Kent Homes is the largest homebuilder in Atlantic Canada. For over 50 years, Kent has been offering homebuyers’ quality modular homes in a safe year-round building environment.

Challenge

Map the customers journey and simplify the purchase process. Provide Irvings’ in-house development team with easy to follow design templates for the website redesign.

Process

Initially, Kent Homes wanted an infographic and few updated page layouts that their in-house web development team could turn into templates, however, after an in-depth briefing on the project it was clear that their website functioned as crucial component of their customer experience, therefore requiring careful consideration and ultimately a complete overhaul.

The first phase was to simplify the clients “customer experience map”. What began as a lengthily word document became a board game like illustration that customers could easily understand at a glance.

The icons that are used in the map were expanded upon and grew to be part of the navigation system of the new website. These icons are also used throughout Kent’s factory signage and collateral material. The second phase reorganized the web content. I worked with the client closely, and showed through prototyping that consistent hierarchy and clear, short verses of text could accomplish more than volumes of industry jargon.

A considerable design challenge of this project was that the site would need to be built by Irving’s in-house web development staff on a platform of their choosing. To keep the development as simple as possible I drew inspiration from Google and designed content blocks as “cards”. These cards would have the same typographic styles, padding and word count throughout. This meant that the development team only needed to code a few elements, and then apply them accordingly. To this end a comprehensive style guide was written, which explained very clearly how the elements should be built.

The website was completed in the spring of 2015, Kent was very happy with the results. And even though it was not as meticulously executed as it could have been it has had a huge impact on the usability and customer satisfaction.