Creating standout resumes in minutes…
Our Role
Branding
Logo Design
Product Design
Platforms
Web and iOS
Deliverables
UI, UX, Branding
The Project
VisualCV is an online resume builder designed for the realities of today’s job market where people change jobs more often and face greater competition. Applicants need to be able to quickly assemble and manage multiple visually appealing resumes. In addition VisualCV provides a deep set of help content, resume writing services and the app makes it easy to manage sharing, privacy, getting feedback and tracking views of your resumes.
The Brief
VisualCV was already a revenue generating product when CEO James Clift reached out to us to help them with a three part project: to help increase conversion and update the look and feel of the marketing site, create a new logo and help redesign the app experience.The Marketing Site
The original VisualCV marketing site was heavy on describing features, light on benefits and outcomes. We needed a new story, one centered on people, one that reframed the brand as a partner in the challenge of building a fulfilling career. To transition the content from a list of features to a story about goals and outcomes we reached out to the users of the platform and asked them how VisualCV had helped them in their journey. These success stories helped bring the current users of VisualCV to the foreground. Once we addressed the primary positioning challenge we focused on trimming down content, simplifying navigation and organizing the great help content the team had already produced. We also worked to increase the SEO and readability of all content pages, in particular the blog and educational pages. Our revised home page was tested against the previous page and provide a near 20% boost in conversions when tested side by side.
The Logo Design
Sometimes you get a detailed brief from the client, and sometimes you get something more like “I just want something bold… and It needs to look good on a t-shirt”. To be fair, we’ve had a similar request with a slightly more permanent litmus test when a client requested it look good as a tattoo.
The process for logo creation is a
Generally when designing logos you need to expect the context will include small scale deployment like favicons, because of that we needed something that works in multiple scales and either in colour or as a monochrome mark.
In the end the selected solution explored ideas of individual timelines punctuated by events on the timeline. The construction of the logo isn’t visible in its monotone version so it is easily used at small scale (or at very large scale).
There’s almost always a twist. In this case part way through the logo design process we got word that the logo needed to extend beyond Visual CV to work with an upcoming sibling brand Workstory (a project we would later help design a prototype for).
The App
Similar to the marketing site the feel of the existing app was a pretty dry and technical affair. The app at the time was a combination of several technologies created separately or purchased and assembled into the resume builder application. It was usable and solid technically, but the assembly of parts resulted in a disjointed experience and we needed to create a more seamless and easy to use interface.
From the business side we looked at one goal: increasing conversions from free users to paying customers. That meant we needed to overcome a major issue: resume apps are often seen as single use applications (I need a job, I create a resume and once I have a job I no longer need the resume).
What people needed was a faster and relatively foolproof way to get to a visually impressive resume, whether by importing an existing CV or starting from scratch. But they also needed to see the benefits of stepping up to a paid version that allowed them to manage multiple resumes, take advantage of resume writing services, track views of their resumes and get feedback from the community.
Some of these features existed but they were buried, others like the ability to manage multiple cover letters, print preview and peer feedback were experiences that needed to be designed from scratch.
From an aesthetic point of view we wanted to soften the application interface. We moved to slightly softer-edged icons, and a softer font. We created an improved edit interface layout, creating collapsible work panels for each function, adding a tabbed interface for different view modes, and clearly defining the major action buttons.
App Icons
While defining the revised look of the application we itemized and reviewed every workflow. We reviewed the client’s funnel data and page heatmaps for each to identify drop offs and areas that were causing issues. We prioritized the workflow issues based on usage and value and then worked through each iterativley, starting with our assumptions of what was causing issues and then testing to confirm our assumptions. We immediately saw noticeable gains in key areas such as starting a resume and use of previously hidden features.
Bonus moves… New Templates
After the app redesign was in progress we also helped redesign the resume templates that had been developed over time to make them more consistent, and… visual. As is often the case though working on a piece of the application that seems non-technical brings up technical issues. We discovered quickly that.
Codename have loads of experience and really get both branding and product design. They move fast from initial concept to a product design that’s ready for implementation, loved by our users and works for our business.
