CleanCapital[2023]
As a clean energy investment and management company, the team at CleanCapital was in need of a website that could serve as a full-spectrum marketing funnel. The updated site would need to support a diverse resource library, project case study pages, career postings, and function as a central sales tool.
Strategy
Identifying goals and action items
Because this site was destined to house a diverse collection of content for a variety of users, determining key goals was crucial in keeping the UX focused on conversion. From a business standpoint, CleanCapital was looking to gain legitimate clean energy project sale leads. Users, on the other hand, could visit the site for a number of reasons, so it was important to balance the site goals.
Primary goals with implementable action items were as follows:
1. Generate Leads
Purchasing clean energy projects was CleanCapital's primary business goal, so of course generating project sale leads was the established primary site goal. This, however, needed to be properly balanced with needs of the site's individual users who may be at varying points of the marketing funnel.
1. Balance Users' Needs
It was pivotal to properly balance CleanCapital's goal of generating leads with each user's desires because selling a clean energy project is a major decision for someone. Site analytics told us that the vast majority of CleanCapital's daily users would not be on the site to sell a project that day, they would be consuming blogs or podcasts, learning about CleanCapital's business model, filling out job applications, etc.
So, while generating clean energy project sales leads was the main business goal, the site needed to play the long game while supporting users.
To properly balance the client's main business goal with user's everyday goals we did the following:
- Primary and secondary CTAs
- User-flow designed accommodate for users at any stage of the marketing funnel
- Robust Resource library so our site could continually serve users through their user-journeys
2. Organize Resources
Through our initial audit of CleanCapital's previous site, we found that their resources weren't properly represented. The layout of the resource page was not modernized and this caused a confusing navigation experience. This was a major issue due to the significance of this site's resources. CleanCapital wanted their site to function as a resource hub for user's as they progressed through the marketing funnel.
A goal of the new site was to reorganize the structure of these layouts and improve inter-resource navigation.
2. Improve Navigation
To improve overall navigation throughout the various resource types and pages we implemented the following:
- Search and filter functionality
- Featured resource display at the top of the resource page layout
- Simplified pagination
- Reorganized type hierarchy on resource item cards
- Clear breadcrumbs
- Consistent resource layout independent of resource type
- Reorganized resource page structure
Process assets
Below is a collection of assets pulled from the UX design process including wireframes and sketches.
Final Designs
The Project Acquisition page held a form specific to the sale of clean energy projects.
The main Resource page and Project pages featured dark-mode layouts to create distinction.
The general contact form.
Results
Consistent improvements
CleanCapital continues to leverage their website in new ways, recently creating landing pages for in-person conferences to attend.
Overall, this project taught me the value in a comprehensive design system when working with developers. Looking back, I would have worked more closely with our development team to ensure designs were covering all of the bases for this diverse site.
