Wave Rebrand
As of July 2021, Wave was struggling to capture the attention of small business owners with an average of 1% unaided awareness.
In addition to low-aided an unaided awareness, we noticed that newly registered users weren't taking full advantage of the full-suite of product offerings in Wave’s suite of tools. The majority of customers were unaware of the advantages of leveraging the entire suite of Wave products.
To address these key findings, we began the process of repositioning ourselves in the market to make Wave more competitive.
The Rebrand
The Wave brand before was unremarkable in the fintech space. Most fintech brands used the same colour schemes (lots of blue!) and featured crisp software shots and staged photography.
However, examining Wave's customer base, we realized it tended to lean more towards freelancers, entrepreneurs and go-getters who generally don't have familiarity with accounting concepts, and the brand wasn't resonating in that space.
In order to speak to the creative + entrepreneurial business owners, and to make our software feel more accessible, we wanted to lean heavily into illustration and take a more conversational tone into our copy. We wanted to make accounting + finances approachable to any business owner, regardless of their financial experience.
The website
Between 2 designers, we created 42 base-pages that could be recycled across all webpage types. Within those pages we created over 150 reusable components.
We created the base colour scheme to be used across the site, and a design system for mobile and desktop views to ensure consistency across a variety of responsive web sizes. This design system also allowed us to be more efficient as we worked through our 5 batches of page designs.
We worked with 8020 to facilitate the technical side of the migration. The helped us port all of our pages through CraftCMS and build out the new Webflow templates. I acted as the primary project manager on the Wave side facilitating this process.
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Testing
Following this initial design and development, I led the wider marketing team in an exercise of QA for the site. I divided the department into 5 teams. Each team was responsible for testing a subset of pages. Within each team, each person would be responsible for testing within a certain subset of browsers or devices, to ensure the pages were functional across devices and platforms.
Following the web redesign, it was tested with the wider public, and received generally positive results. Customers were able to understand our one-Wave messaging at a much better rate than pre-migration. In addition, users were spending more time on the website, and generally reacting with delight. We have continued A/B testing new titles, images and components to improve the performance further over time.
