Role: Digital Design Specialist, Zoex
Contract
Zoex Corporation is known in the scientific community for its world-record setting chemical separation capabilities. After being the first company to introduce their groundbreaking technology to the global marketplace over 25 years ago, in 2019 it became evident that, in order to better represent the expertise and modernity of the company, a complete rebrand was in order, which would include a redesign of their website.
Based on an analysis of their website design and performance, and after conducting some preliminary rounds of user research, I recommended they prioritize establishing an updated and more cohesive brand identity that embodied their high credibility. To achieve these goals, I collaborated with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, technicians, technical illustrators and animators associated with Zoex.
My Contributions:
Brand strategy and design
User Research
Overall visual design of website
Responsive website build (in a hybrid
collaboration with developers)
Analytics reporting
Ongoing site optimization
Video narration + editing
1. To create more brand awareness and build customer loyalty
2. Establish a positive user experience on their website
3. To educate their audience
In order to accomplish these objectives, I needed to update the company's overall brand identity, advise Zoex on content marketing strategies, and redesign the website. The website design needed to improve their UI/UX and create easily accessible informational content that would improve conversion rates, repeat visits, mobile engagement rates, and overall customer satisfaction.
Because Zoex is a B2B technology company that sells highly advanced scientific equipment to laboratories around the world, their website needed to reinforce their status as a long-established, credible company while also appealing to younger generations of scientists, lab managers and chromatographers moving up in the labor market.
Color Decisions
Most B2B scientific equipment companies cannot justify associating bright and inviting colors with their brand out of a need to appear serious, which can lead to a lot of uniformity and make it difficult to create a memorable brand identity in this industry. This actually presented an opportunity for Zoex, thanks to their signature product: the vibrant GCxGC chromatogram.
GCxGC chromatograms are 3 dimensional diagrams of separated chemical compounds, which are the end-product created by running organic samples through Zoex's hardware and software. The naturally bright gradients of GCxGC chromatograms were already a key symbol of the company before we underwent the rebranding project, which created a unique opportunity to use bright and inviting colors on the website while maintaining recognizability. I developed the color scheme of the Zoex brand by taking their most visually striking chromatograms and building a complementary color scheme around them. This helped lead to a UI that stood out from the competition and created a pleasant visual experience that keeps users on the site.
UX/UI
Designing a new website for a B2B scientific company meant creating a user interface that would appeal to busy scientists and technicians, who make up the most critical segment of Zoex's audience. I created user personas early in the process to help ideate the type of interface and experience these users would want, which included a new site architecture, clean layout, and typefaces that were highly readable, interesting web interactions and on the back end, page speed optimization. Drawing on user research, I learned that most users came to the website to learn about Zoex's products, so I centered the information architecture and user flows on the goal to make it easy for users to find and access that information.
Designing, testing and building a fully responsive website that prioritized user-friendly navigation helped increase mobile engagement by 98% in the first year following the redesign.
Multimedia Content
After identifying a need for customers to have access to more in-depth information about the features and functions of Zoex products, it was decided that Zoex needed to create content for the website that would address those needs.
Professional video editing and narration is a skillset I regularly draw on with web design clients who need product videos or other video content to help tell their story. In collaboration with a technical illustrator/animator and scientists from Zoex, we created a series of 3D animation videos that displayed the features and functions of Zoex products in great detail. This content will be published as part of the soon-to-be-launched next-generation version of the website.
A lot of change-makers (from environmentalists to NASA) are using Zoex's world-record-holding chemical separation technology to help solve global problems, which has made designing for them an interesting and purposeful experience.
Using design to communicate the importance of these applications for Zoex's audience of scientists and chromatographers around the world has been a fantastic learning experience and led me to take a greater interest in designing for scientific groups.
