Complete Redesign: The Yard Dr.

Background

The Yard Dr is an established landscaping business that needed a complete redesign. The old website I found was convoluted and hard to use. Certain pieces of important information felt hidden and difficult to find. My job was to create a new brand identity that would be easily recognizable as well as paying homage to the pre existing history of the brand. I had 2 weeks to conduct user research and identify possible friction points as a potential customer. Looking through their social media and google reviews helped with finding pain points. Making an intuitive to use website was imperative to creating a good user experience.

View the prototype here:

UX/UI Challenges

Convoluted is the one word I can use to describe the current website. Having the logo just be a bunch of words and having it redirect you to the contact page is awful. There are two separate spots to find what services they provide but neither of them are consistent and have different information on them. Not to mention that the services are being listed on the contact page of all places, and twice for that matter. The website has filters for looking at examples of different services that were done on houses but no way to access them on their photo gallery.

UX Research

Pretending to be a potential client and trying to learn about The Yard Dr revealed many of the problems that someone may come across. I analyzed my journey through the website to understand where I personally thought it was intuitive to go. I did lots of research on other brands of landscapers that I thought had good websites and noticed trends and patterns of how their websites were assembled. After my research I drew a wire frame of what a new website might end up looking like, following the design patterns I noticed.

I came up with two personas of the two most likely types of users who would come to the website. A new homeowner looking to fix what the previous homeowner did, and a Rich retired person who just wants the flashiest yard on the block. Exploring these two personas goals and challenges gave insight into how others may have troubles navigating the website. The biggest problem I found was how the website wasn’t “segmented” well. My top priority was to make it clear and concise of where someone might need to go.

Redesign Concept

The first thing to change was the logo and where it was placed and used on the website. The old logo featured a tree inside of a medical star. I wanted to maintain both the outdoor and medical symbolism in the new logo but have it be less “on the nose.” The logo features a snake that is coiled around a cross symbolizing the caduceus. I got rid of the dark stroke and shadows that were on the old logo and also took the tagline off the main logo itself.

As for the website redesign I wanted to make it feel a lot more friendly and clean. I chose a “cream” color for the background of all the pages with teal and green colors being used to highlight what I want the eye to be drawn to. A new homepage was designed to grab your attention immediately. The banner at the top of the page clearly shows the different categories you can find on the website. In general almost all the content of the website is the same but just cleaned up and separated into sections.

Conclusion

Redesigning a company identity from the ground up is no small task. I regret not doing any user testing with my proposed redesign as it would have likely provided even deeper insight into how I could improve the user experience. However, overall I am satisfied with the end result and think I have made improvements to making the brand unique and up to date.