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How I Made Sauce Labs' Website Awesome 
(and Appealing to Both Startups and Enterprise Organizations)
User Research (UX)

Interviewing customers for video case studies gave me direct insight into the core value propositions of automated testing.

Creative Direction + Production

Meeting real users and understanding our value made catering the site to those exact needs easy. After that it just needed polish.

Copywriting

The hard part was making sure we still sounded Sauce-y, while catering to a new enterprise audience.

The Problem

Sauce Labs wanted to expand its market into enterprise-sized organizations. It had already established itself as a developer favorite and was massively beloved by the open source community, but in order to scale and become profitable it needed to gain credibility with bigger customers.
 
In addition to maintaining its developer, open source, and SMB communities, it needed to shift its messaging to appeal to enterprise concerns. Strategically, this meant:
  1. Speaking to security and scalability issues.
  2. At the same time it needed to simplify the way it talked about its benefits to appeal to a bigger audience.
  3. It needed to support that shift by upleveling the content and making it more visual.
Changing the tone was a challenging task, because it didn’t want to alientate its other users.

The Old Home Page

The old home page I inherited was dark, did not map back to Sauce personas, and did not provide clear benefits.

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The Solution

I was a key contributor to the brand refresh, messaging update, content marketing/production, and creative direction that went into simultaneously upleveling the website while making it easier to understand for enterprises, analysts, and semi-technical or foreign folks. 
  1. I provided the editorial guidelines in the update brand book that helped to speak to new audiences.
  2. I made a strategic choice to add more visual elements to the website and content to help simplify the value and benefits of testing.
  3. I interviewed real customers to learn what they needed in a testing product. I turned those stories into videos and case studies.
  4. I leveraged those customer insights and authored messaing on the website that spoke to each of those personas.

Updating + Up-leveling the Brand Book

The brand book was created to help Sauce maintain consistency in voice, tone and imagery while we scaled and catered to a new audience.

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Updated Brand Book

Updating the brand book was a critical component in the journey towards expanding our audience, since as a company we needed to maintain our Sauceiness. This would help us guard the vibrant brand we’d developed, avoid alienating our orginal userbase, and expand into the enterprise landscape.
 
I saw three key elements that would need attention:
  1. Maintain the brand and old community.
  2. Expand into enterprise.
  3. Simplify for a global audience, investors, and analysts. 

Customer Stories 

Customer interviews were useful for a variety of reasons.
  1. It gave me insight into exactly what benefits of automated testing were. That helped in crafting the narrative around our value propositions.
  2. The video testimonials were great visual content that could be used in our onboarding emails.
  3. The stories were repurposed into case studies and quotes throughout the website.

  1. Slide 1
  2. Slide 2
  3. Slide 3
  4. Slide 4
The Web Refresh + Homepage

Done in parallel, the web refresh reflected all of the additional work I put into the brand and customer stories. 
  1. After doing deep research into who our customers were, understanding our personas was easy. I made the strategic choice to cast people who reflected those personas to live on the website’s home page. For more about the photoshoot and creative direction, read here. 
  2. To ensure that the updated messaging and value propositions came through, I opted for rotating text in the H1 line that said, “Automated testing made (reliable, secure, scalable, awesome)”. The goal was to pique interest of enterprise companies and decision makers while maintaining the brand integrity and speak to developers. The H2 line contained several longtail keywords for SEO purposes that still helped humans understand how Sauce Labs fit within the testing ecosystem. 
  3. Lastly, we included two buttons for lead generation and education: “free trial” and “watch video”. 

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