Category: Website

This is a comparison website UX redesign case study from March to May 2018. We worked for Bart Pluskota, who ran CDNfinder at Zerouno, on the visual design, the illustrations and the landing pages of a platform where companies discover, compare and buy CDN services. Bart’s own developers built it, and we coached them on the design files.

Comparison Website Audit First: A Slow Page, a Long Form and Two Missing Tools

Our first message was a list of questions, not a mockup. Does the purchase page really need that many form fields? Why does the page download so slowly? We also said the page was too crowded for the 8 to 15 seconds a casual visitor gives it. Bart’s answer on the form was practical: the fields were compulsory because the purchase flow ran on WHMCS, and customizing it would cost them the system’s updates.

He wanted more purchases of CDN plans, more requests for CDN assessments, and information that was easier to read. The contract allowed up to 10 hours a week. Our first estimate was 20 hours or more, about $2,000 at today’s $100 an hour, and a few months before A/B tests would say anything, longer with little traffic. With small traffic we suggested bold tests: three buttons for two weeks, one button for the next two.

Before drawing anything we asked for two tools, Hotjar and Google Analytics access. Our reason, in the chat: “those are my eyes, without them we have just ideas, not data”.

Comparison Website Heatmap Findings: Nobody Scrolled to the Provider Cards

Within hours the data was uncomfortable. Direct traffic was poor quality. Organic visitors bounced, and so did returning visitors, which pointed at the page and its message and not at the traffic source. After only 39 recorded events (a small sample, and we said so) the heatmap already showed that nobody clicked the cards below the first screen. A week later the pattern held: nearly all interactions happened in the first screen, a few at the footer, and almost nobody touched Compare.

Most guides to HIPAA-compliant websites stop at the legal layer: encryption, signed agreements, audit logs. Those matter, but a visitor never sees them. A visitor sees whether the page makes sense in the first few seconds. This is a HIPAA-compliant website design case study, the landing page design side of the LuxSci project, from our own messages with the client: what we changed, where they pushed back, what went over budget, and what we would do differently.

Landing Page Audit Before the Redesign: Hero Video, Hidden Buttons, Clutter

The first thing we sent LuxSci was not a mockup. It was a written list of what was wrong with the existing homepage, and it was blunt. The hero video, with animated characters explaining the product, felt “like a spammy landing page designed to grab fast cash for a few days and vanish.” The calls to action were there but you had to play what we called a pixel hunt game to click one, because an unnecessary slider sat in the way. The page was crowded, and weak contrast and small type did not help.

Then we wrote the goals on one line: more visible calls to action, less friction, less clutter, better copy. We looked at about a dozen providers from LuxSci’s own competitor list, Hushmail for Healthcare, Paubox and Virtru among them, to see what the category already looked like. And we rewrote the homepage copy in a shared document before anyone opened Photoshop. Words and layout first, colors after. A text document is the cheapest place to disagree, and Erik Kangas, LuxSci’s CEO, could read it and comment on it from day one.