Unifying a Fragmented Product Suite
Revisiting our brand story through persona driven user journeys.
Role on the team: Owned strategic direction and design leadership across the initiative, including design thinking facilitation, information architecture, and iterative product design.
Deliverables: Research and insight presentations, experience audits and opportunity mapping
Creating a Cohesive Brand Experience Across the Product Suite
Over time our products evolved reactively and without a shared pattern library, resulting in a visually fragmented experience across the suite. When we stepped back to evaluate the end-to-end user journey, from pre-purchase to purchase and post-purchase, and we realized our brand story (color, illustration, metadata, etc.) wasn’t cohesive at every touchpoint.
Make It Worth the Dev Effort
Was bringing one brand color across every platform enough? Would aligning button shape and color create meaningful consistency? What about illustration style? Aside from these design questions, a huge problem that was surfaced was the inconsistent metadata on assets through the purchase process. Facilitating cross-product conversations wasn’t a nice-to-have, it was essential for making this work. We chose to start where alignment felt most achievable: shared components. Any time a user sees a book card, it should look like this. Any time they land on a product detail page, it should look like that. While utilizing different databases for metadata, how can we be consistent as possible through out the user journey?
Standardizing Without Sacrificing Flexibility
By introducing this shared component across products, we created a clear standard the team could rally around, especially when subjective feedback surfaced during the design process. Consistency throughout the user journey was a goal everyone supported. Even when different touch points required unique functionality or had database limitations, key experiences (like search results) could still look and feel familiar. And because course material access cards needed to support complex business logic, we designed them to be flexible enough to adapt without losing consistency.
A Brand Strategy Built for Scale
When working with institutions, we support custom branding so users feel connected to the school they attend. By applying our brand strategy at the component level, we were able to deliver consistent branding across key touch points throughout the user journey.
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