SEEDA

Initial Prompt

The initial request from SEEDA was quite straightforward — to update their corporate website to improve its user experience and increase visual appeal to attract prospective clients. With this in mind, we began our work by understanding SEEDA’s business and what their needs were.

While the objective was clearly defined, we approached our research with an open mind, staying receptive to uncovering additional design opportunities that could bring value to the client.

Exploring Design Opportunities

Ethnographic Research - Understanding SEEDA

SEEDA was a then newly-established company that provided engineering and project management services. Their goal was to bring a fresh perspective to design and operations — one that reduces the environmental footprint of projects while also positively impacting costs and socio-economic outcomes.

We explored their customer base and what the company and clients’ needs were through weekly interviews with SEEDA’s president, and online surveys to potential engineering clients. I also went through their existing website, social media, and digital assets to pinpoint possible problem areas.

Main Insights

• Customers need a clear understanding of SEEDA’s services and value. However, the website’s confusing information architecture made it difficult to navigate and find relevant expertise.
• Sustainability is what SEEDA excels at, setting them apart from competitors, yet this message wasn't clearly conveyed through their branding, website, or digital assets.
• SEEDA's website had low traffic and didn’t attract new business, relying instead on referrals and employees' professional connections.

Initial Design Directions

Based on the initial insights, we decided on our preliminary design directions:

Understanding Users

Creating Personas

We created three user personas based on SEEDA’s expected client base to better understand their pain points and needs. These personas helped guide our design decisions and served as constant reminders of who we were designing for throughout the process.

User Personas. Left - Junior Project Manager; Right - CEO of Engineering Company

Journey Maps

We then created journey maps based on two of the more common client types to gather concrete details of pain points throughout the decision process, helping us identify design problems and refine our initial directions.

We found that the "Consideration" stage was the most vital part of the journey, as the success of attracting and landing a contract with the client lies here. This was where the client would interact most with the company’s collateral to determine if SEEDA would be a good fit for their project, whether it be the website, marketing materials, or project proposals.

One of two journey maps created - above is the journey map I created for the engineering department head persona.

We decided to refine our design directions based on the “Consideration” stage as it had the most opportunities to design for, focusing on web and visual design improvements.

Refining Design Concepts

Road Block

At this point, we struggled to refine the design directions further based on the personas. We realized our difficulty stemmed from us still having an unclear understanding of SEEDA’s business. This led to our content being too vague, having personas that weren’t truly representative of their client base, and an art direction that didn’t truly reflect the company.

Back to Research

We interviewed SEEDA’s president again and came to a final understanding of SEEDA’s desire to be a part of substantial, sustainable projects from larger clients, and that bidding for projects was a major part of their work as well. Another interview with an engineer provided new insight into how a project manager (our main user persona) would begin to work with a contracting company.

Revisiting our main insights, we found that the most important issues to tackle were insights 1 and 2 - that customers needed to have a clear understanding of of SEEDA’s main services and their value, and that sustainability is an area where SEEDA excels at compared to competitors.

Reframing Design Problem

To address the ambiguity of our design directions and content, we had a brainstorming session where we generated and grouped how-might-we questions related to all the research findings gathered. We categorized these questions into common themes such as sustainability and web traffic.

This process led to the development of our final problem statement and a HMW question to frame the problem:

Problem Statement - We intend to design an identity through clarity to communicate to clients that SEEDA’s sustainable solutions are accessible and good value for the cost.

How Might We - Communicate that SEEDA’s sustainable solutions are more affordable and advantageous compared to competitors’ traditional options?

Visual Design Direction

As SEEDA lacked brand guidelines and had inconsistent digital assets that didn’t reflect their identity, we created a mood board to capture SEEDA’s qualities and values, then translated it into visual designs that could be used throughout our presentation materials, and later their branding.

We chose imagery that represented sustainability, organization, innovation and transparency; images that were green and earthy, as well as ones that reflected human organization and communication.

Mood board representing SEEDA's qualities and values.

3 Design Concepts

After updating the personas, we decided on three design opportunities to work on and created a visual presentation of the ideas according to our new visual direction.

Concept 1 - Content Organization

As the existing website was difficult to navigate and did not convey SEEDA’s goals clearly, we wanted to clearly show SEEDA’s competencies and services through a reorganization of their corporate website.

Concept 2 - Re-branding

To highlight SEEDA’s trustworthiness and sustainability, we aimed to visually convey these qualities through rebranding. Their previous design language and digital assets were inconsistent and did not accurately reflect the company's identity.

Concept 3 - Bidding

As bidding was found to be an important part of the business, a redesign of their bidding assets could be advantageous to SEEDA as professionally presented documents (eg. slide templates, brochures, proposals) could leave a better impression.

Storyboard

Storyboards were also created for each design opportunity to illustrate how each could impact the user's journey.

Storyboard for "Concept 3 - Bidding", showing how redesigned bidding documents could leave a better impression.

Participatory Workshop

We held a virtual participatory workshop with stakeholders from business, engineering, and environmental sectors to gain a range of perspectives and to refine the three design directions into one final impactful concept.

The workshop aimed to answer these two questions:

• What does clarity and sustainable change mean to people in the engineering and environmental industries?
• How can SEEDA communicate that they can help their clients create sustainable change?

Workshop Activities

Three activities were chosen to address the two questions:

• Collage - Participants created collages to depict their ideal sustainable world and their view on engineering and sustainability.
• Mind Mapping - We used mind maps to explore what participants value in communication and sustainability during the engineering consulting process.
• Brainstorming - Participants listed and discussed remaining issues and solutions related to their values, then had a group discussion regarding them.

Mind mapping and brainstorming activities in our virtual workshop on Miro.

Workshop Result

To answer our first question about clarity and sustainable change, we found that transparency in the engineering process was important to both engineers and environmentalists. Implementation of sustainable models aren’t perfect and clients want to be given the real facts about the process.

To our second question, SEEDA needed to use copywriting that was clear with limited jargon so that both scientific and engineering-related clients could understand their engineering process.

Effective branding was also important in conveying SEEDA’s mission, values and capabilities. Together, transparency, clarity, and strong branding build trust and strengthen client relationships.

Final Concept & Design

From the workshop and continual research, we determined that website restructuring and branding would be most impactful for SEEDA, and that the effects of a re-brand would cascade into bidding assets too.

We combined these into a single design opportunity:

Brand Style Guide

In the new style guide, we wanted to communicate a consistent message to SEEDA’s audience about the defining elements of the company’s brand and introduced a new colour palette, typestyle, image style, logo usage and more. Each of these elements were chosen to emphasize the company’s professionalism and core value of sustainability.

An overview of some of the main components in the new brand guideline.

For example, we conveyed sustainability and engineering expertise through the use of earthy green and orange, porcelain white, and shades of grey as these colours evoke notions of the forest, earth, and concrete.

These guidelines ensure consistent, on-brand content, improving SEEDA’s communication with clients and reinforcing their message of sustainability.

Redesigned Website

The original website was confusing and difficult to navigate. By restructuring the website’s information architecture, new content headings and imagery would allow potential clients to recognize SEEDA as a sustainable company and have a coherent view of their values and services at a glance.

Post-Project Implementation

After presenting our final designs to SEEDA, they decided to utilize our new website design and brand guidelines, and asked our team to implement them using WIX and Canva.