🗓 Completed in Q1 2022
Contents
💡 Kicking off an alignment workshop
💎 Designing meaningful changes
🏢 Company overview
Lindar is a UK based, parent company within the online casino space, originally positioned to serve bingo players with its nine white label brands.
Over the span of a few years, Lindar became renowned amongst customers and affiliates for one of its brands - MrQ. For this reason, Lindar made MrQ its flagship brand and also evolved it into a casino-first brand, partly due to market demand and partly due to business viability. The remaining eight bingo white labels were retired although MrQ still retains a low bingo profile to date.
At the time of writing, MrQ acquires 10,000 new depositing customers month on month.
👥 Team & responsibilities
Team
- Head of product
- CTO
- Product designer (myself 🙂)
- Communication designers
- Front-end developer (consultant)
- Content manager
Responsibilities
Managerial
- Organising and moderating kick-off workshop
- Identifying problems and opportunities
- Prioritising objectives
- Defining project scope
- Briefing and liaising with communication designers
- Aligning with devs
Design
- Interaction design
- UI design
- Writing copy
- Mocking early graphical assets
🤔 Problems to be solved
Lindar.com was outdated and misleading to anyone on the site
Due to the shift in focus from several white labels to one flagship brand, Lindar.com featured information that was redundant and misleading to partners, affiliates and candidates. Some of the issues included: talk about brands the company had retired, outdated company perks, a discontinued blog section, misinformation about the company setup, and more...
We were struggling to hire talent - our parent site hardly helped
During the pandemic, hiring design and tech talent was a struggle. We were spinning our wheels posting ads on platforms and trying to head hunt, however, most of our effort was in vain.
In the end, we realised that candidates could only form an opinion about us by looking at MrQ or Lindar.com, and unfortunately, we weren’t doing our best to showcase what we really stood for as a company on Lindar.com. It was time to better reflect the company and all things that were going on, so we could excite leads about the truly amazing innovations that were taking place.
💡 Kicking off an alignment workshop
The initiative was lifted off the ground with some internal research. I organised a short, one hour workshop, roping in our CEO/Founder, CTO, Head of product and myself in order to align on why we were tackling the initiative. In short, the workshop was structured into four parts as outlined below.
Understanding the original intent behind Lindar.com
The workshop was kicked off with a short Q&A with our founder. The goal was to understand the original purpose behind the site from the man who knew the history, and all the specifics about the company’s trajectory.
Our short but insightful Q&A helped the team understand where we came from, where we were going, and helped us asses whether our site reflected our story.
Here are a few slides from our mini workshop:
Identifying redundancies
After understanding the purpose behind the site, the team went into the first lightning round. Participants were given five minutes to list redundancies within the site; items that could be removed with no consequences.
After the five minutes elapsed, people took turns to share their thoughts - it was interesting to see were people aligned.
Here are the ideas that emerged from this portion of the workshop:
Identifying ideas for improvements
After listing redundancies, we shifted gears and went into the next lightning round. Participants were given five minutes to list ideas for improving the site, and were encouraged to focus on addressing the evident gaps.
After the five minutes elapsed, people took turns to share their ideas and once again, it was interesting to see some solid alignment on some ideas.
Here’s what emerged from the workshop:
Prioritising objectives
The lightning rounds left us with a number of thoughts, however we wanted to make sure we’d prioritise the ones that would address our problems and provide results. All ideas were placed into one of three columns: Must have, Should have and Nice to have respectively. After this exercise, we felt ready to role our sleeves and get designing.
💎 Designing meaningful changes
After our workshops, it was time to jump into Figma and begin designing. We kicked off by exploring a few directions of an improved home page, which removed redundancies from the live site and included new contents we agreed would be valuable to include.
This portion of the project was sandboxed to take up one day, after which, we planed to align behind a direction.
Improvements to Lindar’s home page
With a day’s worth of home pages at hand, we had more than enough to poke our fingers into. The mocks helped us identify where we were aligned, where we didn’t and what was left in the backlog. Following the alignment session were a few days of expanding outwards, this consisted of refining the home page and also building the child pages in high fidelity. The improvements we made were many, however the following four were the main ones.
1. Putting our flagship brand front-and-center
MrQ, the company’s flagship brand, was nowhere to be seen on lindar.com at the time. We decided to give the brand a prominent space at the top of the home page, together with updated copy and graphical elements which reflected the core of the new brand. Rather than demoing MrQ, we decided to give people a link to the live product so they could always check out the very latest.
2. Promoting our internal tooling to attract talent
Every new hire spoke about getting a glimpse into our internal tooling during their interviews, and being very impressed with the level of insights and control they provided. We thought it was a pity that people could only learn about our horse power during their interviews and so, we decided to pitch our tooling on Lindar.com to be one step ahead in attracting talent.
Without sharing any sensitive information, we were able to capture and pitch our tooling on the home page.
3. Positioning the company as a tech and design driven culture
Lindar’s product team take pride in setting things up properly and reflecting the latest in tech and design. Unfortunately, this was not coming across on Lindar.com - and presumably decreasing our chances of attracting talent.
In order to give candidates a taste of the product culture, we decided to share some information which portrayed us in a nutshell. This included videos about our tech stacks and architecture, brand guidelines and also our product design languages.
4. Making it easy for candidates to apply for a job
Up until this point, applying for a job was a messy process for candidates. Candidates would head over to the site, search for the careers page, go through unformatted job descriptions and finally, send an email to HR to apply for a role!
The improved design exposed open positions on the home page, making them quicker to find, and labelled them by category for easy scanning. Job spec pages were designed to follow a simple and structured format, making it easier for us to write new posts, and easier for candidates to scan them.
The improved design gave applicants a glimpse into who works at the company at the end of every post, so they could learn about the team on Linkedin and possibly reach out to any member to start the conversation.
The improved design also included a much needed form which applicants could fill in to apply. Upon applying, candidates would see a confirmation message on site and also receive an automated email which would keep them in the loop on what was happening.
🏁 Final design
With an all new strategy and site structure in place, and an equally fair indication of what we wanted to communicated, it was time to refine the edges before publishing.
All copy was fine-tuned by our content manager, who went over the project word by word to ensure we communicated articulately and in our tone of voice. Moreover, all assets were designed from the ground up by our talented communication designers, who had the challenge of communicating complex ideas with simple and engaging graphical contents.