Landing Page Design

Project Background

As uncomfortable as the subject matter is, it is the one thing that every human will experience. While the figures vary it is widely accepted that roughly 50% of adults in the U.K. do not have a will. The Law Superstore offers users the opportunity to compare tailored quotes for over 130 legal services from legal professionals across England and Wales and offers a plethora of useful articles to aid them on their legal journey.

Sadly we were losing a lot of users on our existing landing page for wills, with many users leaving the page immediately or dropping out of the quote process early. It was clear we needed to breathe new life into this landing page (pun intended).

My Role

As the only UX Designer working on this project I was tasked with identifying the issues with the current landing page and creating a new landing page that helped users at any stage of their will writing journey. This project was created in UXPin and from research to prototype took roughly 3 months.

What I Did

Plan and Conduct user interviews and Research

Facilitate Cross Functional Team workshops

Create Lo-fi Designs

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Create Prototypes (UXpin)

Testing

Research

Interviews

I started by interviewing people who had recently had a will written to get a better understanding of why they had a will written, how long it took them to choose a legal service provider and why they hired the professional they did.

83% of respondents took a month or less to select their service provider with 55% of those people taking a week or less.

The reasons people had a will written were evenly spread but all centred around major life event's such as birth, marriage or home purchase.

72% of those interviewed had their will written by a solicitor, with 11% using a will writing service and 11% using a will writing kit.

One of the key takeaways from these interviews was people who had a will written were still very confused about the process, with many of them not fully understanding the protections that were offered to them. A common complaint of the respondents was they struggled to find clear information on having their will written and found many commercial websites off putting due to their “hard sell approach”. For the mass majority people picked their legal professional based on their customer service over how much they cost.

Usability Testing

After getting a clearer picture of the journey, I wanted to better understand how our users were experiencing the current landing pages both through moderated and unmoderated usability tests and from viewing recordings of site sessions.

Key Pain Points

Lack of trust for the service – users were concerned about the quality of legal service providers offered on the website.

Page was not engaging – users felt the page was not engaging with many feeling the page looked dated and bland.

Not clear what service we offered – Many users automatically assumed the site was for a lawyers office, missing the price comparison aspect completely.

Users would start the quotes process too soon – Many users would jump into the quotes process immediately, often dropping out before reaching the end.

Users often couldn’t find content – When asked to locate wills related content users often struggled, normally giving up on the main content hub page.

Defining the Problem

The page was missing key information that would help inform and reassure potential users of what the service was and why it should be trusted. It failed to help further the users understanding of common questions or educate users on the options that were available to them when writing a will. As such I decided the page should contain the following elements;

A clear outline of the quality of the professionals found on the site
A simple explanation of what the site does and how it works
A transparent account of reviews (both positive and negative)
Clear and easy to read chunks of commonly required wills information
Links to additional information on the website

Ideation

Brain Storming session

I started by sharing my findings with the cross functional team working on this project and held a remote ideation workshop (you’ve got to adapt to homeworking). This workshop helped the team highlight the service USP’s and also focus on our key areas of trustworthiness. We also were able to discuss and settle on key pieces of content that should be placed on the page, which combined the research that had been conducted with the figures for google analytics for highest viewed content.

Wireframing

One of my initial ideas during the wireframing process was creating a page that would adapt to the user's needs if they answered a couple of questions about their will needs. I quickly moved away from this as while an interesting concept, if the user did not engage with this feature they would be presented with generic and less focused information.

I then focused on creating clear blocks of information that would focus on selling the site and made the content as engaging as possible. During this process I played with different styles of displaying the content of the page and different styles of layout. While creating these I tried to retain the concept of one "block of information" on the screen at one time.

Design

Visual Testing

As I started to cement the page features and layout I started to do some research and testing with new visual styles. From a previous project I knew that photography went across very poorly with our users. After doing some market research I found most of our competitors used graphics on their sites and this was something I wanted to test. This also gave me an opportunity to test the different layouts and features I had been working on. These tests were unmoderated and held with users who were over the age of 45 and earned under £28,000 per year (These are two key demographic of our users). Out of the three styles utilized the flat graphics received an overwhelming positive response.

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Prototyping

I ultimately created three distinct prototypes that all contained the same copy but displayed the information in different formats and used different methods of display and interaction. I tested these prototypes individually and together, with design 3 proving to be the most popular among testers. Users responded extremely well to the page hierarchy, feeling the page had the “right amount of information” and felt the graphics used made the topic feel less morbid. They also really liked the interactive elements of the page, given the expanded information when they wanted it.

There were a couple of issues that I picked up on while tested this design though, the biggest complaint about this design was the user testimonials, with many users feeling a distrust to these "cherry picked" statements. Many users felt that the user reviews section from design 1 should be placed on design 3 for the most trustworthy experience.

Design 1

Users liked the simplicity of this design but felt it was too plain, although they did respond well to the user review panel.

While the copy was the same on all three pages users often complained this page had too much text.

Design 2

A small number of users preferred the layout of this page more, feeling the process was more important than establishing trust.

This page was vertically the longest and least interactive. While the layout appealed to a minority of users it was heavily criticized for its length.

Design 3

The most popular design users felt it was professional and trustworthy without feeling too overbearing or morbid.

Users loved the layout of the page, feeling it was well laid out and responded extremely well to the interactive features.

Current Status

After choosing design 3 I made some slight adjustments to the design based on the tester feedback (the biggest change being the addition of the user review panel) and after some final testing was confident in the final prototype.

This project has been handed over to development team and is awaiting implementation, as well as the graphic designer replacing the placeholder graphics with our own brand of flat graphics.

When launched this project will be A/B tested against the current page and measured on it's ability to attract and convert higher intent users and increase return traffic on lower intent users.