Kanjoya web design

Company overview
Kanjoya was a fifty person startup based in San Francisco. Our product is a workplace intelligence platform that uses natural language processing alongside machine learning to analyze employee surveys and quantify employee values, biases, attitudes, engagement, and performance traits.

What I did
Co-Owner

Who I worked with
Geri Cruz, CMO

Varun Mehra, Visual Designer

Dates

July 2015 ⁠–⁠ September 2016 (1 year and 3 months)

Summary

During my time at Kanjoya we went through several iterations of our website. As we refreshed our brand and messaging, the website needed to be updated accordingly.

Bringing brand and messaging together

I was Wordpress master alongside Varun, one of our designers. As the marketer in the pair, I made sure we integrated our new branding and messaging.

When we overhauled our website we noticed that our product snapshots were either covered up by text and a dense opacity layer (our cover photo) or they weren’t clearly visible. Generic iconography took up most of the visual real estate. Additionally, all the old messaging was geared towards explaining our sophisticated tech instead of the value we were delivering.

Product also wanted us to distill the process of how using Kanjoya would generate business insights. They wanted to tell a story with snapshots of our product.

Our “request a demo” button was being used about 2/mnth according to Marketo. Most of our demo requests came through word-of-mouth.

Telling a story with our product

The work involved adapting our new brand guidelines to a new narrative, which would then be applied to the website.

Much of the work our product was doing was hidden from the user. Our product would ingest open-ended feedback and quantitative data and then spit out the results.

A lament we often heard was that context was missing.

Our approach was to provide this context through visual explainers of our product on our website and through product demo videos, which I owned.

Product demo videos

I scripted, voiced, and produced product demo videos (120k+ views) that halved the number of our enterprise Sales reps’ touchpoints with prospects.

There was a story built into the demo environment of our product. Using that story alongside our new messaging provided the raw material for the product demo videos. My Australian accent was considered unique so I also voiced the videos.

Storyboarding the videos

My goal was to first produce a one minute video before developing a more involved video series. Using storyboards I was able to quickly shop my idea with Marketing and Product. Once I got buy-in, I produced the one minute video. This was received well by our Sales team and customers. The initial feedback was that it lessened the time involved to make a sale by 20%. After I produced my first one minute video I went on to produce a multi-part video series.

From short form to long form videos

I went on to make ten product demo videos, each highlighting different parts of the product. We tested these videos through email attachments, gated Marketo backed forms, and embeds on our website.

This helped increase demo requests on our site by seven fold and halved the number of our enterprise Sales reps’ touchpoints with prospects.

Below is the multi-part series I made. It tells the story of how the Kanjoya Perception Platform is used by the company, Aviato.

1. Why perception?

It integrates open-ended responses and quantitative data with best-in-class machine learning algorithms.

It distributes insights to the right people at the right time.

It covers flexible survey schedules and a mobile-first experience.

2. Where does the problem lurk?

You enter the Kanjoya app as the CEO. At a glance you notice Adam’s team is causing low engagement.

High performers are most likely to leave. The Kanjoya app can detect the workplace value themes that these High Performers are dissatisfied with, which ends up being day-to-day operations.

3. What change can Kanjoya inspire?

We do a deeper dive into Adam’s team and take a look at one of his front-line manager’s, Lorelei’s, low engagement score. Here, we can action plan as we notice there is poor communication between Lorelei and her direct reports.

New headshots

For the company page, I photographed our team with brand new headshots, that was more in line with our look and feel, which put people first.

Before

Going under the hood of our product

I worked with Varun to sketch out some viable graphics, with him producing the high-fidelity graphics. The messaging was workshopped over several weeks with the Marketing team. Together the graphics and messaging was iterated with input from our Sales team.

Varun and I sketched out some versions of our website. The flow was workshopped with the rest of the Marketing and Design teams. Once we settled on the overall flow, we implemented the changes.

Evolving our website

Here is how our website evolved from focusing on the tech to focusing on the value. Other pages were also updated along these lines.

This effort prepared us both for scaling up our number of customers, we went from two to twenty five between July 2015 and September 2016, and our eventual acquisition.

We made minor adjustments along the way. What’s shown below are the primary versions of our website. We made tweaks based on Marketo metrics (tracking clickthrough rates and and time spent on each page) and anecdotal feedback from customers via our Sales team.

July 2015

In this version, the “Request a Demo” button led to a simple marketo-backed form. Once the prospect was in the funnel, one of our sales reps manually followed up with them. No product demo videos existed at this point.

January 2016

Here, when a prospect clicked “Request a Demo” they were taken to a marketo-backed form. However, upon form submission, the prospect would then receive a product demo video in their email. Concurrently, one of our sales reps would follow up with the prospect. If the prospect scrolled all the way to the bottom and clicked “See How Our Solution Works”, they would see our product demo videos. Also, notice our brand guidelines being used in this iteration.

We increased demo requests by 500%.

September 2016

In this final iteration of Kanjoya’s homepage before we were acquired, we included real product snapshots and opened with a workplace image. We gated our product demo videos behind our “request a demo” buttons, because we noticed a higher conversion rate when prospects submitted their data in our form. They would then receive our product demo videos in their email.

What I learned

Perhaps most surprising was the shift in requirements from when we were selling to customers versus preparing for acquisition. In the former, it was about being disciplined with incremental changes based on our web metrics. In the latter, we highlighted our rolodex of customers and geared our messaging and imagery to that specific acquirer, even at the expense of our metrics.