Redesign

Perfect Moment Wedding Planning

This client has been involved with Wedding Planning & Coordination outside of her regular job and wanted to bring her website up to par for an upcoming Bridal Expo to point potential Brides to. Her eventual goal is to increase the number of bookings and gain more experience so that she has the option to replace her income. This made me prioritize for long term growth as well as short term needs. Here is how I tackled this project for her:

1.) Market Research

I wanted to give her the opportunity to grow and optimize for a larger audience down the road, so I started with an overall look at the National Wedding Planning Market before focusing in on her local market. I delivered a packet of information to her with resources should she plan to ever look into getting certified or taking on specific niche markets that I identified, but here are some basic stats that are useful:

National:

The average wedding cost is around $32,000 with large differences depending on location, this has been slowly increasing again after the recession. The average age of marriage for women and men is 27 and 29 respectively. The average engagement length is between 13 - 18 months, while the average time spent planning the wedding is 14.5 months. 32% of couples use some kind of wedding planning service, although the vast majority of those that do use a planner opt for a “Day of Coordinator” most often, accounting for 56% of services rendered by planners.

68% of couples do all of the planning and coordination by themselves; making Brides the biggest competitor for Wedding Planners themselves. 47% of these couples reported spending an average of 1-9 hours per week planning, while 40% reported spending 10-15 hours per week planning.

74% of couples that decided to plan their own wedding considered eloping at some point due to the frustrations of planning. With women currently comprising 47% of our workforce, this is a substantial amount of extra time that they almost solely take on.

This Research allows us to keep an eye on the big picture for later on and draw conclusions about our local consumer in comparison. Here are some of the highlights for her local Market:

Local:

An average of $21,579 is spent per wedding in this area, which is well below the national average in terms of cost. 47% of couples opted for some type of Wedding Planning service, which is well above the national average of 32%.

Another difference here is that Full Service was the most popular package chosen (accounting for 34% of services rendered) and Day of Coordination was a close second with 32% of services rendered. The average prices paid for both of these services was similar to the average price paid for them nationally, despite the significantly lower budget for weddings and the local increase in tendency to use these services.

2.) Empathizing with the Consumer

After looking over all of the Market Research and getting a good idea of places for growth and opportunity, we needed to hone in on the needs of her local consumer by creating a User Persona. After looking over a ton of demographic information for the region, using Facebook Audience Insights, and her own experiences with local brides, we came up with a pretty detailed Consumer Persona. Clearly, we had a lot of fun with this one, which it made it easier to design solutions and tailor everything to her later on:

3.) Balancing Business & Consumer Needs

After getting into the shoes of the Consumer, we looked at the Business needs as well to see where they overlapped so that we could prioritize our strategy around those commonalities. This is where you will get the most return on your investment. So we laid each list out together and then searched for common threads.

Business Needs:

More customers
Better (more) reviews
Word of mouth Advertising
A positive Brand
Brand recognition
Enjoyable planning

Consumer Needs

Education beforehand about the time and effort she can expect to spend on the wedding so that she can make an educated choice.
An emotional connection to the wedding
Easy and open communication
Faith in the company
Feeling like a priority
Understanding of her family values
Flexibility

Overlap

The Business needs that we outlined are only gained through many Brides enjoying their Wedding Planning experience with my client.

Based on the Consumer needs, this gives us a clear idea of what we need to focus on. The Bride wants to feel safe, secure, and important to a Planner before she hands over the reigns to her big day. Weddings are already emotional, and so that emotional connection in the process is of paramount importance.

4.) Design Challenge: Creating an Emotional Response and a Clear Brand

Since we knew that the most important thing for us to spend our energy on was creating a positive emotional response, I needed to convey this from the very first time a potential Bride landed on her page. Of course my client would need to focus on this throughout the process itself, but the marketing & implementation plan would come later.

We wanted to get across a clear and concise brand image as well so that the brides that signed on would be a good fit for my clients past experience and style. This Increases the likelihood of the Bride enjoying her experience, and therefore would help meet the long-term business goals that we outlined above.

With the challenge of needing to create an emotional experience for visitors on our page, I used the technique "Crazy 8's". This is where you divide a piece of paper into 8 different sections and then give yourself 1 minute for each square to create a completely new design solution each time. I then sketched 2 completely different website layouts that incorporated all 8 of my solutions, and transferred them over to a digital wireframe that I could easily walk my client through for us to choose from.

Digital Wireframe

Creative Design Solutions & IA Sketches

2 Unique Page Layout Sketches

By focusing on the bare elements of the page, we are able to get an understanding of our layout and the experience without being distracted by the design elements that we would be adding on later. This allows us to speed up the process by helping to ensure a strong foundation before we move on to to the visual design aspect. We ended up choosing the more simple layout (on the left) to move on to the next step with.

5.) Visual Design

Now that we'd taken the time to choose our structural foundation, it was time to move onto choosing our color scheme that we could plug into our wireframe and add details to. For this, I still needed to keep in mind that were trying to create an emotional response, consciously and unconsciously.

I used some psychological principles to get an idea of what colors I should be looking for as a base, color theory to help decide on a contrasting color for the "Call to Action" elements, and compiled a collage of inspirational pictures that I used to represent the kind of wedding that my client specializes in to make sure they complemented each other: