Create a website that will mainly provide customer support for the company. The goal is to emphasise the brand’s values. Besides the landing page, the website will need an about page, product pages. The landing page should have an About the Team section. There should be a call to action to get users to order a free sample. They would prefer a modern design, and would like you to use the brand colour, which is white.
This project called for restraint on accounts of the design, focusing on the "White" brand colour and modern feel. I created a brand identity system which included the word-mark and used the produce used to bring in colour.
This being a spec project, true impact cannot be measured, but I think the impact would be equally distributed between the users of the site, gaining a better insight into Gray Lava while exploring the informative products. And, on the other hand from the client, as the management of the website was designed to save time while updating info and products.
To create a website with its main focus serving as "Customer Support" for the company. Gray Lava is a maker and distributor of health foods, with its target audience being "Teens" - promoting a healthy way of life.
The companies current position was as a distributor, they wanted to make a clear and defined statement about being a health leader in the industry while focusing on the young in order to help grow the next healthy generation of people by educating and making there healthy products easily available.
Gray Lava wants to offer education around their products, how they are sourced, produced and what makes them so good and healthy for people. They ran a social media campaign stating this, and the results were great, but the amount of questions in the comments and calls to their offices became unmanageable, a nice problem to have.
This spurred the decision to create a website based on the questions from the comments and the calls received. The solution was a "Customer Support" concept mixed with underlying secondary purposes, them being, Brand Values, Modern design (re-brand), teen focused and most importantly easily navigated by the user, but also easily manageable by the internal marketing department.
The products offered are seasonal and thus need updating, and this needed to be very easy and efficient, specifically because the current website required a developer to make any changes in the past, this took too long as there is no developer in the company and so needed to be outsourced and didn't allow Gray Lava to be reactive to the changing market, and this was very expensive.
I created a seamless content management system with Webflow, which allows the team to make changes themselves without the need of a developer; - "Updating products information" - "Loading up new products" - "Featuring products as required" - "Adding/Updating content"
Everything is now manageable by the internal marketing department, saving both time and money for Gray Lava, but most importantly giving them full control over their website.
Restraint was the main challenge on this project, it was tempting to keep adding to the functionality of the website and add other features and so on. I didn't, kept it simple and clean and to the point, focusing on the goals outlined right in the beginning.
This being a spec project, I can only speak of my personal gain. Exercising restraint, focusing only on the problem - "supply information to the users about our products" and making an equal goal for the client to be able to manage the site after handover.
I'd like to think that "user experience" is equally important to the experience a client has while managing their website.
UX - User Experience
CX - Client Experience
"We focus on the "User Journey" so much that we sometimes forget about the client and only think of the Client's client's. On this spec project I attempted and succeeded in maintaining equal importance between the Gray Lava's users and Gray Lava as a backend user.
You can explore the project for yourself via the link below.
