A brand and product reposition, and design system optimisation
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1 min read
Challenge and role
Business problem
Fika wanted to expand into the workplace market to increase revenue. We needed to offer a more competitive proposition to compete with established players.
Fika was well established in UK universities and colleges. 91% of the companies revenue came from this sector. However, Fika wanted to transition into the workplace sector to increase revenue growth.
How would we get there?
Design challenge
How might we provide a relevant, valuable brand and product experience to people at work?
I collaborated with our Head of Product to consolidate the strategic direction for the workplace market using insights from user research and competitor analysis I conducted to inform barriers and opportunities. This resulted in 2 high-priority projects I took the lead on:
What I worked on
Product strategy
Design system
Visual design
Creative vision
Prototyping
Brand definition
Concept testing
Web and native app
Who I worked with
3 Developers
Head of Product
CEO
Sales and marketing team
2 Designers
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Spotlight 1 • 7 min read
Implementing a new brand and design system
Saving the business £7500 and increasing prospective customer pipeline by 128% in 3 months
Design challenge
How might we create a desirable brand for people at work?
Insights from our sales team revealed consistent feedback from prospective customers – Fika was too 'student-centric' and didn't feel relevant for employees at work. We aimed to increase the number of prospective customers in the pipeline within the quarter (3 months) from 35 to 50.
During this project, I identified an opportunity to increase design team efficiency by implementing a consolidated design system to provide consistency and knowledge sharing across departments.
How we got there
Defining the brand vision
Testing perception with workplace customers
Design implementation across the service
Advocating for adoption across teams
Defining the brand vision
I ran an internal workshop to deeply understand our current brand and future direction with the team – with input across the business from engineering to sales and marketing. Resulting in a vision board (figure 1) and further consolidating into a postcard from the future (figure 2) – giving the team a concrete direction to what various aspects of our product could be.
Figure 1. workshop outcome – vision board to align and get team buy-in
Figure 2. Postcard from the future – consolidating direction in real product examples
Testing perception with workplace customers
After aligning the internal business, I led a series of customer interviews to understand perceptions of the new brand. We combined this with other features being experimented with and consolidated it into a single prototype experience to test (figure 3).
We were surprised to learn that graphical and illustrative styles were off-putting to our target users – reminding them of previous ‘wellbeing’ apps that didn’t solve their core needs (e.g. headspace, meditation). We found photography of people at work was well received, with the analogy of physical fitness to mental fitness acting as the most engaging narrative, quickly conveying Fika’s potential value.
Figure 3. Prototype I used in concept testing
Design implementation across the service
Results from testing gave us confidence to proceed with implementation of our new brand direction. From product and engineering to sales and marketing, there were many stakeholders I needed to influence and get adoption from. But how could we most effectively do this?
I broke the approach down with our Head of Product and CEO, prioritising the lowest hanging fruit to make impact across teams and build momentum. I shaped an initial style guide keeping things very simple to allow our product manager to apply it to internal sales decks, while I focused in on two area’s - product interface and social content.
Auditing the current state
I ran an extensive audit of our service touch points (figure 4) and product components (figure 5) to understand where to prioritise effort. The audit was a useful tool for discussion with department leads to increase buy-in and help me prioritise effort. I got approval to address the core product experience covering user flows with multiple components in registration, onboarding and the core exercise experience in the web and native app.
Figure 4. service touch point map
Figure 5. product component map
Figure 6. Prioritisation exercise I led with Head of Product and CEO
Collaborating with engineering
As this project progressed, it became clear that we were looking to improve fundamental aspects of our component library. I decided it would be a valuable exercise to internally interview engineers and designers in the team to understand how they were currently using our component library in Figma.
Feedback highlighted barriers in using Figma, and getting new team members up to speed. It became clear that alongside updating our component library, there was a need to create better documentation for shared knowledge and improve the file structure used in Figma.
Figure 7. Updated Figma file structure
Figure 8. Documentation consolidated in Notion
Implementation approach
After reviewing different approaches to consolidating our component library with our engineering team, we decided to proceed with adopting and customising an existing design system - material design. This considered a variety of factors - from team familiarity with the system, its ability to address our documentation and accessibility challenges and its capacity to deliver this within a short period at a low cost.
I applied our new brand direction to the component library and implemented it within the prioritised user flows, working with our engineers to troubleshoot while making our first releases.
Figure 9. Internal component library
Figure 10. Documentation of component library use and customisation became a valuable focus between design and engineering to prevent additional tech debt during build
Team adoption
After implementing the new brand direction within our component library, I applied the brand styles to other tools and templates teams could use. For example, enabling our social team to create content in Canva and Figma by providing templates in our new brand style.
To help teams get up to speed effectively, I ran internal cross-discipline brand workshops helping different teams understand what good looks like while getting them excited to advocate for the new brand approach.
Finally, I worked closely with our content team to coach designers and shape guidelines for video, photography and tone of voice.
Figure 11. Team templates for social use, from Canva and Google slides templates to Figma
Figure 12. Brand workshops helped people in different teams get to grips with the new brand direction
Figure 13. Content guidelines
Outcomes
↗︎ 128% increase in prospective customers in the sales pipeline in 3 months (35 → 80)
↗︎ 18% increase in design/developer delivery efficiency, saving the business over £7500 in 3 months
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Spotlight 2 • 4 min read
Converting 15 new clients and increasing training minutes by 89%
Group training
Shortly after the launch of our rebrand and new design system, I led a project that repositioned Fika's product offering to the workplace aiming to increase our workplace customers from 2 → 10 in 12 months.
User feedback revealed that after a shift to remote and hybrid work, managers indicated they were struggling with team engagement and motivation - impacting performance. We discovered they were trying to use Fika’s self-guided courses in meetings but struggled to get participation. We used these insights to create a coaching tool, that allowed managers to facilitate healthy discussion at work.
↗︎ 6% decrease in employee sick days taken
↗︎ 15 new clients converted
↗︎ 100% of managers surveyed would recommend
↗︎ 89% increase in avg. minutes trained per user (9.9m → 26m)
The group training feature – led by a psychologist, each guided training session involved multiple team activities from videos to discussions that could be used as a team over video call or in-person.
How we got there
Group discussion experiments
We experimented with making the experience engaging and easy to use, exploring warm-up games to polls and timers. We tested concepts for team interactions, like asynchronous messages, group voting, training leaderboards and audio guides.
I worked with engineers to reuse existing components, adapting them for use – enhancing the existing platform experience while creating new value. We simplified the design for flexibility, allowing components to adapt to Fika's individual courses and team experiences, increasing user's satisfaction rating to over 90%.
Outcomes
↗︎ 92% reported improvements in the trust, communication and connection of their team
↗︎ 85% noticed improvements in their people's confidence
↗︎ 6% decrease in employee sick days taken
↗︎ 15 new clients converted in 12 months
↗︎ 100% of managers surveyed would recommend
↗︎ 89% increase in avg. minutes trained per user (9.9m → 26m)