Project Overview
Acquisition.com is an investment company that scales businesses above 3 million in revenue. They offer courses, podcasts, and books on their website. Also, there are forms for scheduling meetings with them on their website.
They started in 2020, and they continue to grow rapidly. I’m a huge fan of their content and efforts to help businesses. I believed their website didn’t match their potential and needed a makeover. So, I did the entire redesign and branding as a volunteer job for them to thank them for the value they are providing.
In this project, I had a close collaboration with a full-stack developer. I did the design parts and he did the development. There were occasions that we had to compromise, but the overall result was satisfying for both of us.
We soon found out that they are already undergoing a redesign with a company and we couldn’t move forward with them, but I took it as a challenge and experience for myself and finished my part.
Problem Statement
The website design had a lot of UI and UX issues, including visual representations, text, behaviors, and incorrect or no feedbacks. Below, you can see some screenshots of the previous website.
PS: They recently changed their website to a new version and these screenshots are for the previous design.
Discover Phase
Heuristic Evaluation
I did a heuristic evaluation on this website to find exact problems. Below you can see part of the results of the heuristic evaluation. As you can see, this website needed a lot of improvements. And this checklist helped me tackle these problems one at a time.
Interviews and Questionnaires
I created an online form for interviewing stakeholders. It involves questions about their business and their values. Also, the whole brand identity and design needed a redesign, and I created a questionnaire about brand identity and logo design. Below you can see some parts of these questionnaires.
As I mentioned before, when we got in touch with the stakeholders, they were already contributing with a design firm for redesigning the website and logo, so they didn't fill out our forms. So we tried to solve the visible issues that we got by using only heuristic evaluation and the data on their website and their social media.
Redesign Phase
Followed the below steps in the design phase:
- Wireframes
- Final Design
- Implementation
Wireframes
I decided to design this website as a one-pager, because the steps were pretty clear, there wasn't much content, and it perfectly matched the content. Below you can see the basic wireframes for this website. The first design was the basics of the one-pager, which applied to almost all pages of the website. It is the very simple concept of a graphic or photo and a text and a call to action.
Because the founder of this business is an author, his book and its course are the most important content on the website. Creating a one-pager will help maximize the attention on these products. Also, one-pager offers a good user experience both on phones, and desktops. Below, you can see both responsive wireframes.
Final Design
The final design after putting everything together. You can see the designs below to make it fancier I also designed the dark mode.
Implementation
I had the experience of collaborating with developers before, and as I moved forward I learned many things in this process. This project also wasn’t an exception. Disagreements are inevitable parts of collaborating and the important key is learning how to use them to improve the product. You can see the final website in the light theme here.
Branding
I created this document to deliver to the Acquisition.com team so that they have the same understanding of the brand identity. This document can help them keep their brand consistent on each platform.
Guidelines
Logo Design
Mockups
Takeaways
In this project, I improved my skills in:
- Heuristic evaluation.
- Close collaboration with a developer.
- Branding and creating a brand book.
- One-pager website design.
- Dark mode and light mode design.
- Responsive design.