ROLE: Marketing Designer & Front End Developer
In order to help secure enterprise partnerships and help more people, WEconnect needed a cohesive, polished aesthetic and better targeted materials.
As a digital health startup, WEconnect helps people with substance use disorder stay in recovery. By partnering with treatment providers, the company offers its services to their patients. I joined the team during a shift from partnering with treatment centers with hundreds of patients to working to secure deals with major health care providers with millions of patients.
WEconnect had matured as a company—yet its website and many of its branded materials had not.
To accommodate this change, WEconnect had matured as a company—yet its website and many of its branded materials had not. Often created as an afterthought, these designs weren’t allowing the organization to put its best foot forward while working to secure major enterprise partnerships. In addition, the website couldn't be updated without custom code, which created a bottleneck for the marketing department.
With a memorable color palette and a strong typeface to begin with, WEconnect did not need to rebrand. For consistency, I drew inspiration from visual elements in the mobile app while working to create a more minimal, polished aesthetic.
Throughout the mobile app, header sections have a curved bottom edge. I designed many website pages to be consistent with this pattern.
This half-square, half-circle shape appears in a few places in the app, such as buttons. I decided to use it more heavily in marketing materials.
Not many companies use purple as a primary color. To celebrate this bold move, I touched up a gradient from the app and used it generously.
As my first major project at WEconnect, redesigning the website gave me an excuse to talk with people at all levels of the company. I quickly became familiar with the various audiences and learned which to prioritize and what tone to adapt for each.
While a full website redesign is a plenty big undertaking, it served as a perfect crash course on the company. I was also able to hone the company's existing visual elements into an identity system for further use.
Having worked closely with people at all levels of the company to solidify WEconnect's visual identity for the redesigned website, I was able to expand that identity to a variety of other branded materials.
To get the attention of our upcoming enterprise partners' many patients—to inspire them to download our app and get started—WEconnect needed marketing materials that not only looked good but worked!
As such, I proposed, designed, conducted, and analyzed one-hour interviews with 7 app members and a stack ranking test completed by 10 people in recovery from substance use who were unfamiliar with WEconnect.
The qualitative and quantitative results we gathered informed the visual design and messaging of our member marketing materials going forward.
To help our enterprise partners to more easily market WEconnect to their members, I led our team's efforts in compiling a marketing kit with an easy reference guide.
The guide included an overview of WEconnect and suggested copy for emails, texts, and website content as well as quick links to download all of the posters, brochures, banners, and one-pagers included in the kit.
Though it's challenging to consolidate what I've learned from nearly a year of full-time work into a few brief points, here are my key takeaways.
Leveraging a template instead of building the website from scratch (as I had in the past) saved me days worth of work. I've been converted!
Without a marketing manager or copy writer to collaborate with, I learned how to work with other departments to create and finalize content.
WEconnect being my first job in health care, I learned the many compliance considerations of marketing to federally insured patients.
