Finding wor(l)ds with bocca
Designing a website isn’t only about nice assets, great photos and thoughtful copy. That’s just on the surface. Under the hood, decisions were made based on clear buisness needs and understanding target users.
Challenge
bocca is a relatively small translation and copywriting studio. Their old website was crammed with information, and without a clear architecture or purpose, it wasn’t really achieving its goals. bocca team wanted to send a more clear-cut message about what they really are all about and that way attract new customers and collaborators.
old website
My process
Understanding requirements by collaborating with the core bocca team gradually started clarifying business goals of the new website. Although bocca offers lots of services, from proofreading to transcreation, they really wanted to focus on translation and copywriting. The user target group was naturally their potential customers, but also future collaborators. So making it easy to make that first contact was imperative.
Fail early and inexpensively
bocca has reached a stage where they had some great and important clients and they were proud of the work they were doing. Since showcasing their work will help seal the deal with a potential client, we started identifying copy excerpts that could depict each great story behind a project.
Paper sketching was the quickest and best way to ignite that spark within the bocca team and get them thinking about the journey we were about to embark. It made the whole process of discarding an idea and starting a new one — quick and painless.
We struggled a bit with how to best illustrate a project as it was impossible to really demonstrate the diversity and volume of a specific assignment. One excerpt just didn’t cut it. It didn’t tell a story of the how and why behind.
Finaly, we moved away from that idea only to replace it with a better one.
Their words… about worlds!
However, after digging deeper into how bocca as small company works - it became clear that what they authentically cared about was reassuring companies and future collaborators regarding the value they provide. Their well deserved admirable reputation was unmistakenably achieved through word of mouth, which was confirmed after conducting a couple of interviews with a few existing customers who were willing to share their experience around getting in touch with bocca for the first time. It became clear that they didn’t care about the specifics of any other project bocca was working on. They wanted to be reassured about their expertise.
Those findings moved our focus on customer quotes and more importantly - starting a blog where bocca people could write about what are the real drivers behind their approach in work. I’ve started pouring sketches into hi-fi designs.
So what’s so special about bocca?
Online reserach on their competitors revealed some interesting information. Most of them didn’t have a decent website, for one. Secondly, bocca was one of the rare in the market who offered translation in more than 8 languages. And last, but not least important — people working at bocca were creative people. You could feel the great energy just by entering their offices.
We’ve come up with a playful section on the homepage that nicely illustrates their creativity and emphasizes their diversity in languages they work with. Inspiring words in different languages work as a positive bait to open up blog posts that appear on hover.
Empowering the bocca brand
bocca has invested some efforts in building their brand when the compnay was started. It was time now to reinforce the brand with well thought out typography and custom icons.
From initial wireframes on paper to fleshing out final hi fi designs, the bocca story was becoming more tangible. But it was InVision prototypes that really breathed life into the visuals and enabled more great conversations about the new feel of the content. Furhtermore, this was a great way to start communicating with the team at Iconis, responsible for development and implementation.
Making the website responsive was not questionable, as today, mobile optmization is critical to all sites’ success.
The focus was on desktop, but a decent amount of effort had to be invested into building the mobile experience. Again, we resorted to paper sketching, but this time combined with designing in the browser around technical constraints.
Solution & impact
Analytics show that visitors of bocca web are now staying longer on the page. The team actually started getting requests through their website for the first time. But as bocca girls like to say, those are just numbers, the real value is in the great realationships they nurture with their customers. Now with a stronger brand and a more effective website at their fingertips.
visit