X-Mode Website

UX / UI

Project Overview

X-Mode Social is a location data startup that provides anonymized geolocation solutions for the advertising, cybersecurity, and financial industries. In my role as a generalist User Experience Designer at X-Mode, I was tasked with transforming the company’s brand identity and designing their website. I was a product owner from beginning to end of this project, gaining personal leadership skills and helping the company cultivate user trust in an industry often lacking in it.

Responsibilities

Design Concept
UI/UX Design
User Research
Branding
And a lot more

Process

Discovery

Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
Stakeholder Interviews
User Personas

Define

Information Architecture
Sitemap
Wireframes

Design

Visual Research
Style Guide
User Interface
User Testing

Develop

CMS Integration
Custom Development
Analytics Integration
Search Engine Optimization

Starting Off

User Interviews + Competitive Analysis

User Personas

Understanding Our Audience

I kicked off the project with some background research. I did a competitive analysis, and interviewed stakeholders from all of our target markets: from app developers, hedge fund managers, digital marketers, and IT managers to better understand their pain points, and what makes X-Mode stand out.

Website Goals

Build Trust at Every Touchpoint

Create a calculator for app developer’s page
Highlight data quality with use-cases + statistics on data licensing page
Create a charity program to improve PR, create use-cases, and help others at no cost to X-Mode
Everything else will come as an effect of these

Project Challenges

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Communicating to stakeholders can be hard
Put in a UX design process
Collaboration is key to success
A lot of Responsibility

Taking Focus

Creating Information Architecture, Sitemaps and Wireframes

Building Off a Brand

Creating a Style Guide

One part of this project would entail improving the company’s branding and styling. The company had started its life as a youthful, disruptive startup, but was maturing into a major data provider in the fast-growing location industry. The challenge, then, was to create a brand system that effectively communicated these new aspirations while preserving the company’s young, startup roots.

This involved much more than just picking out a new color palette. To help X-Mode stand out from its competitors, I designed a suite of custom graphics for use across the website and marketing materials. I also provided a brand guideline to help digital marketers on the team to create assets on their own. The resulting brand was authoritative but approachable, and was implemented across all company touchpoints.

Constructing The Solution

Creating the Interface

Designing X-Mode’s website began with extensive research to gain an understanding of the company’s audience to craft user personas, and ultimately a brand strategy. This helped me clarify the website’s goals, allowing me to create a user flow map that effectively guided leads into the sales funnel. Every element was designed for purpose.

The most time consuming part of designing the site, but also the most personally rewarding, was building extensive wireframes and mock-ups that met all of the goals set by the company. Each mockup was tested before and after site launch, gathering plenty of data to confirm their effectiveness. This allowed for easy stakeholder buy-in once I began the development phase.

Web Development

The Power of WordPress

Choosing to build the website on WordPress was a no-brainer for our team. This popular, accessible platform met all of the goals: a fully custom user experience, fast integration, powerful plugins and tools, and ease of use for other departments. Maintaining the site would be a breeze, and made upgrading and future-proofing simple. Search engine optimization was added alongside writer training to ensure the website’s position on google was solid.

Results

Better Analytics

Since launching their new website, the trust between X-Mode’s customers and it’s products has grown. Bounce rates have dropped, session duration has increased, and customer acquisition costs are now returned in gross profit in less than 7 months, down from 16 the year prior. The work of building a well researched, highly strategized and carefully crafted website is not only rewarding for me as a designer, but incredibly profitable for the company.

Visit Site

Let’s work together.

Contact Me

X-Mode Website

UX / UI