2023
Design Systems
Brand Design
Product Design
How I transformed an outdated brand into a trustworthy one, increasing conversion rates by almost 20%
My Role
Lead Designer — visual branding, design system development
Team
Worked under our Director of Design, Calvin Lamothe, and alongside a CRO/LPO strategist in a project team of around 5 people
Overview
Policy Paul is a character created by BMG360 aimed at making life insurance as simple and accessible as possible. He serves as the face for this lead aggregation platform as "your friendly neighborhood insurance guy".
As the potential to scale this vertical venture was becoming more and more apparent, the team recognized the need to redesign the brand to influence a more trustworthy and legitimate presence.
I assumed the lead role in shaping the brand's visual identity. Having recently completed Molly Hellmuth's Design System Bootcamp, I had the opportunity to apply my new shared knowledge of advanced Figma features while getting to practice and improve my systems thinking.
In the weeks following the launch of the first rebranded landing page, the blended conversion rate (form fill and call clicks) saw a significant 19% increase. More users were able to learn about life insurance and explore their options.
Meeting the challenge
The primary challenge for the Policy Paul platform redesign lay in elevating the initial design and brand, which lacked credibility and modern appeal.
It featured an array of non-harmonious blues, with two dominant secondary colors vying for attention, and a limited inclusion of neutrals for constructing and layering compositions and UI elements.
The team's hypothesis was that the original aesthetic fell short of conveying trust and legitimacy, hindering user confidence and therefore leading to less leads and more unpleasant user journeys.
This project was a major effort across multiple channels with a tight deadline. On the design side, we needed to iterate quickly while laying down the foundations of the design system in a deliberate but flexible way, allowing for future growth.
Building the right foundations
Whether designing a new brand or refining an existing one, one effective strategy I have found is to choose one or two pages to focus on that would hypothetically represent the brand design best. This allows the team and I to quickly iterate and explore different brand directions in a practical manner that is considerate of the most important part of a user interface, the actual content.
After my initial explorations and facilitating some brainstorming sessions, I focused on refining the foundations of color and typography. The main color scale was harmonized and secondary colors were expanded for greater versatility. Each primary color was meticulously developed with a full scale of values, providing flexibility for decorative elements when necessary. Greyscale and UI palettes were added, enabling more layered compositions and adherence to best practices for inputs and lead generation.
The original sans serif was updated from Inter to Lexend to add personality and a geometric counterpoint to the organic handwriting. A new serif, Lora, was added for additional versatility and easier legibility in long-form content (e.g. blog posts). We decided to maintain the handwritten typeface but use it more sparingly.
Bringing it all together
To align with competitors while maintaining a friendly and familiar quality, we refined the brand's tone to be subtler and more professional. We improved accessibility and ensured best practice usage in our lead-collection form to enhance user experience and hopefully increase conversions. Collaborating closely with the creative team, we developed a visual strategy for the Paul character that resonated with the updated brand identity. Finally, we designed both organic and paid assets utilizing the new branding, ensuring consistency across all touchpoints.
Image Slideshow
Accessory pages.
Outcomes and insights
In the weeks following the launch of the first rebranded landing page, the blended conversion rate (form fill and call clicks) saw a significant 19% increase.
In this project, I was granted autonomy throughout the process, allowing me to tackle problems from start to finish—a responsibility I really enjoy. Leading a project requires understanding the 'why' behind decisions to ensure that good design choices withstand stakeholder feedback. With the help of the team, I was able to turn a boring, archaic looking brand into a refreshing, trustworthy, and much more exciting one.
There were many lessons learned from the challenges and decision-making moments regarding setting up the design system foundations—I learned to trust both myself and the process. It was built in a way that the team and I can make small or large scale changes easily and immediately. Implementing variables for the first time allowed us to stretch that muscle for the first time and be more comfortable experimenting with it and using it to improve our workflows across the board. It was definitely a step in the right direction and since then, we have found even more ways to make our Figma workflow more efficient.
