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Yodle

UX, Branding, and Web Design

Overview

Yodle is an international company that helps small to medium sized businesses get more business by providing a platform for SEO and client management. When I started working at Yodle as my first job, I was one of two designers inside a workforce of over 300. By the time I left Yodle our design team was 18-strong with a workforce of over 1,000. We saw massive growth and had a great time working on making the brand cleaner and friendly.

I was primarily involved in the Marketing side of the team, but worked with many different departments to create all kinds of products across the company. It was my first taste of designing globally and had a lot of fun with the brand.

Goals

My goal at Yodle was to learn - to soak in as much as I could. Over the course of over 2 years I got a chance to understand how to build teams, how to build websites and software, and how to properly engage a Marketing team. I wanted to learn how to evolve a brand from the inside, and have a hand in how it was being developed.

Branding

We started by refreshing the color palette. It had a serious case of rainy day palette, and our team worked on slowly nudging it in a brighter, more upbeat direction. I made some tweaks to the existing logo since I couldn't change it, and we updated the typography structure to give it a bit more life.

We also updated Hans, who was Yodle's official mascot. He started off quite scrappy but I think we breathed some real life into him. My co-worker Karoleen DeCastro did the illustration while I took on the role of Art Director. 

I even made a pixelated version of him that eventually was converted into a favicon. It was a really fun exercise in seeing where he fit best into the experience. We focused a lot on his voice as well - he was the advocate for our clients, and spoke to them in a casual manner.

Website

Our website was crying for an update, and we were excited to get to apply the brand structure we had worked on into the corporate site. We wanted to keep it friendly and informative.

We started off with white boarding, and then  moved into wireframes that we married with needs form the Sales and Marketing teams.

Once we had a good idea of all the requirements, we moved on to visual mockups using some light visual treatments.

Once we had a more workable version that felt cleaner, we start iterating and sharing ideas to drive the final to more polished place.

Product

I also worked on an internal tool for our sales agents that helped them streamline their process. We took input from them and worked up some wireframes that allowed them to keep better track of their prospects and commissions, ultimately increasing revenue and productivity through design.

Then, just like we did with the website, we moved onto visual finals. I took the guidelines we laid out and created a UI that felt clean and easy to digest.

The Outcome

Working at Yodle was a really great learning experience for me. Getting to grow a team and a brand like that was really something special. I made some really great friends and learned the importance of having fun with your team. It was my first taste at large-scale product design, and set the course for me to move on to bigger and better things.