TL;DR
As the first and only designer during my time at UserEvidence, I was tasked with branding, product, visual, and marketing design. I designed everything from the logo and wordmark, to the user-facing web application, customer-facing web application, and marketing site. In addition to design, I also provided front-end development assistance to the Principal Developer, ensuring that all UI/UX matched the Figma designs I created, and helped with testing the web applications across multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems.
Introduction
When co-founder Evan Huck first reached out to me about joining UserEvidence in October 2020, it was a team of three - two co-founders and an engineer. The co-founders had worked together at SurveyMonkey, and saw that there was an opportunity to take customer satisfaction metrics - whether through testimonials, NPS, star ratings, survey questions or reviews - verify the data, and present it in a visually enticing way. The goal was to create a software platform that could do just that.
After hearing about the initial application concept, I began working with the team to create early data visualizations that the application would produce, joining full-time a few months later as the second employee of the company.
The Problem Statement
B2B companies need customer references, case studies, and other types of customer evidence and success stories to effectively sell their high-consideration products, and prove their case about why they are better than competitors and how they will deliver return on investment. However, it's very difficult to find happy customers willing to go on the record and talk about their success publicly (e.g. financial institutions, federal government, pharmaceutical are all typically reluctant to do case studies for their vendors). Even when you do have willing participants, it takes a lot of time and resources to actually turn their stories into useable marketing content like case studies. So, vendors often have a shortage of customer evidence/proof, making it harder to credibly demonstrate to a prospect that the vendor has delivered results for similar customers.
Initial Wireframes
The only formalized product planning completed prior to my joining the company was a set of wireframes created in Adobe XD.
Distilling Information
While I liked the general direction of the proposed user journey, there were a lot of additional features shoe-horned into each stage. This isn't uncommon. In fact, it's expected. Understanding the shape a product should take is a tremendous skill and it's why product managers exist. When envisioning a future product, it's easy to keep adding features and dreaming of how large the product can become. The more features it will eventually have, the more potential customers you'll have, and before long the feature list is too daunting to begin finding a path to creating v1 to validate the idea.
Knowing this from having built a fair number of SaaS products, I started to boil down the concepts I was seeing in the wireframes, and echoing the patterns I noticed to the co-founders to see if there was a common ground we could find.
Paring back the feature set, I proposed the following user journey for the first version of the application:
- Create Customer Survey
- Collect Responses
- Publish Data
Each of these steps would eventually include sub-steps and additional configurations, but it was a baseline - a starting point that we could build fairly quickly and start testing with users.
Brand Design
When I first joined UserEvidence, they had a placeholder logo. The original logo and wordmark were visually simple (included later in the case study), without a unique quality that a brand needs to stand out.
As part of the logo and wordmark update, I outlined the following needs:
- Convey a sense of "verification"
- Be simple enough to work on busy background images
- Ideally, tie in visuals for "user", "U", etc.
- Work at a variety of sizes
- Work in both color and greyscale versions
Initial Concepts
When first working on the logo, I focused on showcasing various depictions of the user. This began with an avatar/profile style frame, with various orientations and border radius amounts.
From there, I tried a few versions of showing a user with their hands raised, doubling as showing the letter "U".
The user with their hands raised progressed into exploring a checkmark that could incorporate the user.
Second Round
I explored more of the checkmark + user combined image, before moving back into several different versions of a user/avatar depiction. It was during these iterations where I started seeing the strength of the checkmark, and began exploring different ways to depict that common symbol. I wanted it to have curvature, and tried a variety of curved edges, with and without the "dot" or the user's head.
It was also at this time that I started to explore another symbol commonly associated with verified content - the star. More of this symbol exploration in shown in the later images.
Refining Concepts
While I further explored using the star symbol, it was at this time that the checkmark was solidified as the symbol that would be a large part of the logo. It has a simple yet powerful meaning behind it. Additionally, the verified checkmark that appears on social media builds in the meaning to areas where UserEvidence content will appear, and this bolsters the benefit of selecting the checkmark to be used in the final logo.
I tried several different cutaways of the circle to create a verified "badge" of sorts. It was during this exploration where I found the bottom cutaway worked best. It makes for a double image of a "smile" along with the letter "U".
Final Result
After adding the color treatment and creating the wordmark (based on the Inter typeface), the final logo ended up being as follows. The original logo is shown for comparison.
The team and our customers have received the updated branding nicely. It has been over a year since I created the UserEvidence logo and wordmark, and in using it for a variety of placements, it has proven to be a versatile mark.
