Ranku Website

My role

My first task when I was hired at Ranku was to improve the company website. As the sole designer at the time, I was responsible for both the project strategy and the design deliverables. I worked closely with internal subject matter experts and web development leads to understand the target audience, review proposals, and iterate on design improvements.

The problem

Ranku’s website was vague and relied heavily on buzzwords and metaphors, which left visitors confused about the company’s products and services. It also lacked consistent branding and visual hierarchy. As a result, the site attracted an abundance of low-quality leads, forcing team members to spend excessive time triaging unproductive inquiries. For a small but growing company working toward a promising acquisition deal, this was a costly distraction.

Goals

My objective was to provide user-based, data-driven design specifications for a new and improved Ranku website. Key goals included:

• Ensure visitors could easily understand Ranku’s products and services
• Decrease the volume of low-quality inbound leads
• Increase the number of high-quality leads
  
• Improve Ranku’s ROI per lead

Process

To understand the source of confusion, I began by defining Ranku’s target customer. I collaborated with internal subject matter experts to create a persona based on aggregated insights from employees who had direct experience with current and prospective customers. Key persona traits included:

• Applies the same marketing approach to both online and on-campus students
• More experienced with paid marketing than optimizing organic web traffic
• Unfamiliar with terms used on the existing Ranku site, such as “recruitment technology” and “predictive analytics"
  

Next, I analyzed Ranku’s positioning in the competitive landscape and how it could differentiate itself. I conducted a competitive analysis of similar companies, documenting how they presented their offerings, and identifying common trends.

One key insight was that most competing companies were larger and offered a broader set of services. This made it more challenging to explain their products and services concisely on their websites, but these companies had the resources to triage more leads and provide value for them in a variety of ways.

This created a market opportunity for Ranku to pitch their products and services concisely and directly, making it immediately clear to potential customers if Ranku could help them.

To organize Ranku’s marketing content more effectively, I led card-sorting activities with internal subject matter experts. The results revealed inconsistencies in how participants grouped information. I facilitated follow-up group discussions, which led to consensus around a new content structure. Key decisions included consolidating redundant information, simplifying section titles, and streamlining messaging.

During early design phases, I explored a range of low-fidelity layouts to help stakeholders visualize the structure and hierarchy of the new site. Internal reviews helped further refine the content and its arrangement.

The high-fidelity design focused on clear, direct messaging tailored specifically to our target persona, right on the homepage. Key decisions included:

• Leveraging competitive analysis insights to clearly explain Ranku’s offerings directly on the homepag
• Creating dedicated pages for each product and service to ensure visitors could learn more as needed
• Using simple, explanatory visuals instead of stock photography and buzzword-heavy blocks of color found on competitor sites
  
• Supporting Ranku’s value propositions with customer data and real-world success stories to build trust

Results

To validate the effectiveness of the new design, I conducted user testing via usertesting.com using demographics that matched our persona. Test participants viewed either the old or new website and answered three simple questions:

• What does this company do?
• How do its products and services work?
• Who would be interested in these offerings?
  

Test results showed a significant improvement in understanding. Participants who viewed the new website demonstrated a 90% average increase in comprehension across the three questions.

• 95% more visitors correctly identified what Ranku does as a company
• 152% more visitors accurately described how the products and services work
• 23% more visitors understood who Ranku’s target customers are
  

Although the company’s priorities shifted away from implementing a new website, test results clearly demonstrated significant advancement in the project goals: ensuring visitors understood Ranku's products and services to drive an increase in lead quality and ROI per lead.

Tools

• Design: Adobe XD
• Prototyping: Webflow
• User testing: UserTesting
  
• Project management: Notion
  
• Communciation and collaboration: Slack
  

Takeaways

• Writing is designing, content is design, and clarity drives comprehension.
• Focusing on personas can improve the effectiveness of design decisions.
• Internal expertise is valuable but also requires collaborative synthesis.
  
• Competitive analysis can reveal actionable market opportunities.
  
• User testing can validate design proposals against project goals.
  
• Continuous iteration can lead to incremental design improvements.
  
• Companies that don't have the resources to entertain all leads can benefit from tighter targeting to conserve internal resources and increase lead ROI.