My Selcom Internship
Redesigning Selcom's website with an effective storyline to increase customer engagement
ROLE
Lead UX Designer,
Web Developer
TEAM
Ruth Kimacia,
Temitope Stephens
TOOLS
Adobe Suite,
Squarespace
DURATION
6 months
Overview
Selcom is Tanzania’s leading fintech company offering digital payment solutions in various forms across the nation. As the business was scaling rapidly, there was a need to ensure that its website reflects these changes, and speaks to the different target audiences.
I worked remotely as the lead designer in a team of 3 to redesign the user experience and interface flows for Selcom’s website. Our goal as a team was to reconstruct the website content and develop an effective storyline for Selcom’s website to increase engagement and ROI.
Design Process
The 4 key stages of the website redesign were:
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Research
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Competitive Analysis & Benchmarking
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Design Solutions
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Website Development
1. RESEARCH & WEBSITE ANALYSIS
We began with research in order to fully understand Selcom as a company, its target market and its product and service offerings. Because this project was completed remotely, we had very little access to Selcom’s customers and staff. Our research therefore involved:
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Business reports from our direct manager to identify the company’s needs/expectations from the website. Our direct manager also provided a review of the company’s products and services.
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An analysis of customer feedback and comments on social media channels over the past year to identify their pain points and how these can be incorporated into the website.
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An analysis of the existing website to see what can be improved.
Research Findings
Low customer engagement
The business was failing to get sufficient customer engagement on their offerings via their online channels, especially the website.
Underselling of products
The business products and services that cater to different customer segments was not reflected on the website.
Dissatisfied customers
Customers found it hard to locate information relevant to them and would constantly send queries on Selcoms social media channels and contact us forms.
Text Heavy Website
The website was very text heavy making it difficult to find the important points and miss the call to actions.
2. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS & BENCHMARKING
After identifying the key problems, we decided to conduct competitive analysis to find out what leading companies in the industry were already doing, and create a goal regarding what needed to be achieved.
We used benchmarking to understand best practices from websites like Square, Paypal, and Yoco regarding content structuring and information architecture. We then built on these best practices to create a strategy for Selcom’s website.
Research Findings
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Website architecture: Top websites organize their websites by the product offerings that each unique customer segment can identify with.
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Customer Focus: Top websites use wordings that speak directly to the customer. Displaying real stories of real customers can increase trust and connection.
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Website Design: Top websites pay attention to the aesthetics of the site, utilizing imagery and icons to avoid being text heavy.
3. DESIGN SOLUTIONS
UX Goals
Following our research and benchmarking activities, our key focus areas and action steps for the new website design were to:
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Create a consistent and improved theme across the different website pages.
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Reduce text heaviness through the inclusion of imagery, icons, and direct sentence phrasing.
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Restructure the website architecture to reflect the different customer segments and the respective product offerings for each market segment.
Website Architecture
This was crucial as Selcom is a company with multiple product offerings. The storyline for these products needed to be uniquely tailored for the different customer segments that they cater to. We decided to do this by creating a new structure for the website.
Website Design
This was done in 4 main steps: Wireframing, Prototyping, Design iterations, Final Implementation
3. WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
The website was developed using Squarespace, CSS, and some custom elements from Adobe Suite. A new website template that best matched the structure we had in mind was selected and rebuilt. Some custom CSS elements were incorporated to add some additional style preferences that were not offered on the template. Lastly, we utilized Adobe suite to uniquely customize certain aspects of the website, such as the banner images, page backgrounds, and other page icons.
Outcomes
Overall, the new website has been extremely successful in meeting the objectives of increasing customer interaction, site visits, and ROI of the website. The results were measured using the site traffic and form & button conversion analytics available on Squarespace, and are outlined in the images below.
Site Traffic: a 61% yr/yr increase in site visits
Form and Button Conversions: a 387% yr/yr increase in button clicks since the launch of the website.