Brand & web design system for a SaaS client portal
Summary: Redesigned Clinked's brand and website from the ground up — branding concept, product visuals, trust signals, IA components, and page templates — creating a coherent system to support conversion and discoverability.
Challenge
When Clinked product upgraded to v2, website content became outdated — commercial visuals, offering and support material needed a major update.
Role
Sole designer helping Marketing launch a new website, in a team of 4 (design, marketing, SEO, developer).
Opportunities
For user centricity: To improve features discoverability and user journeys conversions. Most features were invisible, and use cases were too similar because of poor Information Architecture and Content Design.
To create a bold and fresh visual brand for Clinked, in a niche lacking courage to show some personality: professional, fresh, human (as opposed to the generic, stale, text-focused existing version).
To own the backend internally (previously owned by an external WordPress web agency).
Achievements
User centricity: The new page structure hierarchy facilitates each use-case journey; while feature discovery across all use-cases supports conversions.
Branding & content: I delivered the new branding and updated content for 300+ visuals, using Norman's 3 levels of design as decisional framework: visceral -> for hero sections + CTA; behavioural -> for 300+ product visuals; and reflective -> for badges, testimonials, reviews, seals of trust.
Objective 3: I recommended Webflow and helped team growing the CMS and Webflow adoption.
Don Norman’s 3 levels of design — Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective — explain how products trigger emotional responses and create lasting impressions. Visceral design deals with immediate, subconscious visual appeal. Behavioral design focuses on usability and functionality. Reflective design engages conscious thought, user identity, and long-term meaning.
Branding
Client Portals need to accommodate a wide range of complex user goals and workflows across industries, and at the same time they need to appear intuitive and friendly. This branding concept addressess the visceral level of design, as visitors need to learn Clinked's brand in an instant. These visuals always appear in the hero sections of landing pages, and for all sections with a call to action.
Product visuals
The product visuals address the behavioural level of design — they suggest the product is flexible, pleasurable and easy to use. They appear in all website pages (~300 UI visuals).
Seals of trust
Whether they are standards Clinked is compliant with, integrations, awards or social proof, the role of these seals of trust is to address the reflective level of design — to consistently give users assurance the product is a reliable choice.
Improving prospect journey with correct Information Architecture
Information Architecture components were designed to facilitate the prospect journey in alignment with the marketing strategy. Their role is to uncover the wealth of Clinked's features and integrations, eliminate doubt ("is Clinked really my best option for Client Portal?") and facilitate progress towards demo bookings.
Page templates
I've used an atomic approach to content and CMS, building reusable components into four types of templates covering any future content requirements (global, use-case, special and features).
