The Basics:
Role:
As the Brand Owner for Hitched, I was in charge of developing the visual brand and ensuring a consistent look and voice. My main tasks were designing a marketing website with multiple phases of launch, creating the overall look and feel of social graphics and ads before handing it off to junior designers, developing a diverse and inclusive image library to represent all couples, and creating a budget calculator based on user research.
Problem and Opportunity:
Couples these days aren't talking about finances, so we created a tool to make the conversations easier. At first we focused on driving pre-signups with our marketing site. Then we pivoted to building a budget calculator that showed couples safe to save and safe to spend categories. All of this is in addition to the Hitched app that was being built by the product team.
Key Stakeholders and their Priorities:
Client: Create something that will show couples safe to save and safe to spend categories, similar to a budgeting tool from competitor sites
CMO: Create a tool that will show couples how to combimne their finances to drive pre-signups for the hitched app
VP: Does it look sleek and modern while also staying up to accesibility standards?
Developer: How will it work and what values will we use to tell couples what is safe to save and spend?
Content Strategist: What categories should we include to streamline the experience and make it useful to couples?
Junior Designers: Do the social graphics and other collateral maintain consistant vision and voice?
The Discovery:
Who are the users/audience:
Couples and newlyweds who are young and digitally literate, but need help becoming financially literate. Through research, we found that 40% of couples don’t talk about finances before they’re engaged. We focused on these couples through targeted advertising on Pinterest and the Knot.
Research and Competitor Analysis:
The marketing team researched and compiled an 100+ page playbook, reviewing competitors and their free digital budgeting tools. We didn’t want to create something as expansive as Mint (by intuit), but we wanted to show combined finances with a simple solution to foster financial literacy in young couples and drive signups.
The Process:
Strategize:
The first iteration was a simple marketing site with few CTAs. Over time the focus changed from driving pre-signups to app downloads and resources for young couples. The budget calculator, when added, was originally planned to be in the body of a content page before we realised that it made more sense to the user to be a separate page.
Visualize:
Using the original brand guide, I developed a website, emails, a photo library, visual guide for social posts, etc. We started with just a landing page and then phased in a full scrolling site, adding in external links as the product grew.
Experience:
As we built the site, I prototyped it in figma, presented it to our stakeholders, and iterated on it regularly with A/B testing to ensure a simple and clean user experience. As we went from design to development, we were contantly testing and auditing the site to make sure the colors and text were accessible, and that all the photos had alt text.
Critique:
After launching the site, we met with focus groups to help us figure out what our next steps should be. We found that some couples have trouble talking about finances, so we created a budget caluclator to spark a conversation and drive signups. We researched other budgeting tools and solutions and focused on a simple and streamlined tool to give an idea of the joint spending budgets within the app.
The Outcome:
Final Decisions and Tradeoffs:
In the end, our team created a robust marketing website with additional features launched quarterly – focusing on the MVP and iterating with best practices each time.
Hitched was the first website I had designed where a client purchased the product halfway through the build, so the needs and wants changed often, and I learned to think on my feet.
