Rebranding and purchase journeys

COMPANY
The Key Support
ROLE
Product design lead

The project

The Key is the leading provider of support for school and trusts in England. With their range of products they provide valuable information and tools to help school leaders, teachers and governors with their day to day tasks.

One of the biggest challenges the company had was that products were being sold individually meaning that many members didn’t know that The Key could help them with much more than just that one product they have bought.

To solve this, they decided to repackage their product offer and present it along with rebranding work.  The company was now presenting themselves as a single product ‘The Key’ with 4 options to choose to subscribe to, which had different combination of services.
Project goals
Lower barrier to entry
With simple product offer and optimise online purchase
Organisation penetration
‍Get staff from multi academy trusts to school teachers using the right The Key service
Clarify customer/member mental model
With new branding and marketing experience

My Role

As the lead product designer I was responsible for defining how this new product offer was going to be presented to customers and the impact on existing members.
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This entailed carrying out stakeholders interviews and workshops to agree on the vision and strategy, market and user research, ideation workshops, scoping and managing distribution of work, wireframes, user testing, producing visual designs and testing after release.
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This was an immense project that had to be delivered in under 4 months which resulted in a big success thanks to the great levels of communication and dedication from everyone involved.

Challenges

The old product package allowed customers to purchase services individually. This provided great levels of complexity on the migration work to the new tier system.

As part of this project, we were also working on merging some of the services to offer it as a single product.

Many stakeholders involved with different visions and priorities

Aligning stakeholders
Marketing, product and engineering team leads had different visions and ideas of how this new product shape should happen in order to meet their team’s goals. So the first step in the design process was to bring key stakeholders together to give a space for everyone to share their needs and thoughts and create a new shared vision for this project. I also took the opportunity to present to them the results of my analysis of the current experience, possible directions, as well as how I was going to structure the project.
Aligning team members
A similar alignment took place at a wider team level. Due to the complexity of the product and the big scope, I considered to be extremely valuable to bring together the team members of all the disciplines to carry out a series of exercises to analyse the current services and do a short ideation session.

This was a great way to get people to express their concerns and get them thinking on the entire journey from the user’s point of view.
Existing customer Journey
At the time, there was a company website which reference all the products under The Key Services brand (of which The Key was also a product) as well a individual marketing experiences for each of the individual products the company was offering. If you find yourself confused after reading this, let me tell you that so did their customers and users.

User research showed that customers and members’ mental model didn’t match the one that the company was trying to present to them.
This existing customer journey presented many pain points along the way which showed in the sales channel data were online purchase was greatly under performing and sales reps were the main source of acquisition.
New customer journey
It was crucial to design a new marketing journey where from any entry point the customer understood that The Key was the main company that provided a collection of services of which they could choose from.

At the moment each services lived on their own webpages with individual domains. For the first stage of the project, this was going to remain so, therefore we had to adapt the individual marketing journeys create a new company wide marketing experience.
New customer journey map
online purchase
With the new architecture, some product combinations that members had purchase were no longer going to exist. Most renewals and upgrades had been managed by a sales person, but with this project one of the goals was to shift this process to the online purchase system.

Transparency was key to make the journey as seamless and clear as possible. The pricing page, confirmation page and invoice were design with the many use cases in mind, to make sure that the right copy was showing clarifying their situation to the member.
Some of the use cases' logic
final designs
New company website presenting the new product offer, new value proposition and branding style.
You can explore the whole journey and final visual design at on the live website.

Release and feedback

The release of the new product structure was handle with the upmost care always having the existing members needs at the centre. The success of this project and its intentions started to show immediately.
  • During the first few weeks of launch we received no complaints from the existing members, nor from those whose specific product combination was no longer going to be available in the future.
  • 13 Total of new sales of which 8 were upgrades to whole school tier.
  • Members were getting in touch to align and improve their product subscription before their renewal date.

People I worked closely with

James Braddy - Head of Product
Rebecca Muenger - Head of Marketing
Tom Smith - Director of Engineering
Laura Scott - Head of Brand
Joel Southern - Senior designer
Anna Samarina - Product Designer
Connor Pote - Frontend developer
Peter Bryant - Backend developer
Tom Ward - Backend developer
John Downie - Frontend developer
Connor Richmond-Clark - Full stack developer
Anita Batra - Senior QA Engineer
Ed Castle - QA Engineer
Kat Norfolk - Senior marketing manager
Erica Rosati - Senior Marketing Analytics & CRM manager
Kieran Dwyer - Sales leadership
Sarah Swain Pope - Programme Manager
Beatriz de Francisco Mora - Data Analyst
Robert Mayes - Member support manager
Emma Sterling - Head of Customer Success

Other Work

Creating the CSA
website
CSA web project image
Designing CSA
mobile game
CSA app project image