Cindy, founder of Northern Lights Immigration Law, approached me with the opportunity to design her site as she was getting ready to launch her own immigration law practice. She came to me with the name of the practice and some high-level business goals and asked me to design everything - the branding, content, and implementing the actual website. I jumped at the chance to help Cindy bring Northern Lights Immigration Law to life, and since this site is one of the first steps in starting her practice, I wanted make sure I represented her well.
Northern Lights Immigration Law's website characterizes Cindy's dedication in helping others and their families gain legal immigration status in the US. Together, we created a branded website that will help position her differently from other immigration attorneys in the area.
Through user interviews and talking to Cindy, we realized that it's important she builds trust and credibility for others to feel inclined to work with her. We aim to achieve this with an in-depth about me section, the option to schedule an initial consultation, past client testimonials, and a brand that feels more inclusive and less "judiciary".
We started off by going over her business plan and goals and then discussed what features she wanted the site to have. Together, we prioritized features based on their relevance to her initial goal - attracting potential clients.
Schedule Consultation was categorized as a nice-to-have, but we ended up pulling that in after realizing Squarespace offered a scheduler plugin that was fairly easy to integrate and customize.
In order to inform how the features should be presented to users, I conducted user interviews with 4 participants who have previously gone through the immigration process to learn about their experience and what's important to them when picking an immigration attorney.
When connecting these insights into the design, I realized a significant portion of emphasis would need to be placed on how the content was written.
One thing to note from these Theme 2 was although finding an attorney with affordable rates was a common pattern across the people I interviewed, we decided to not post Cindy's rates online as it can be highly variable depending on each case and could potentially mislead clients.
Cindy shared a few competitor websites she liked, so I got a general idea of what her style might be. Designing the logo consisted of an iterative process of showing her logo ideas and incorporating her feedback until we finalized on one she liked.
Besides the Schedule Consultation feature, we decided to keep the all the content to a single page in order to employ a "direct and to the point" theme. Without having to navigate across different pages, users can acquire all the necessary details from the Home page to make an informed decision of whether they want to schedule a consultation with Cindy.
The biggest challenge when designing the prototype wasn't so much the design decisions given the limited features on the site but instead figuring out what information to provide and how to communicate it. Feedback from usability testing centered around things like whether clients will understand consultation details depending on a client's proficiency in the English language. To learn more about this, I researched how tips for effective UX writing and revised the content to be more concise, use more simple vocabulary, and be consistent with word choice across different areas of the site.
Instead of designing mobile wireframes my normal route (before implementation), I checked out how Squarespace arranged the content on mobile with the inherited design template. To my delight, everything was layed out nicely and required only a few adjustments here and there. Due to Squarespace constraints, I wasn't able to easily change a few things, but overall, I appreciated the fact that Squarespace offered decent out of the box solutions.
This was my first project using Squarespace and also implementing the actual website and make it live (super exciting!). Although this project leaned more towards marketing, I'm grateful to have had this opportunity to work on my branding skills and work with a real client. Here are a few things I learned and what I plan to work on next.