THE TALENT AGENCY CASE
Designing a website for a talent agency
The website was made about ten years ago. The homepage showed an unresponsive background video that disappeared a second after the page loaded and was overwhelmed by information.
A severely unnecessary, oversized information on the homepage was an unpleasant visual experience. Also, the overall colors were not welcoming and two buttons on the navigation bar were confusing as they both pointed to a contact form page: “Application” and “Contact”.
The research that followed confirmed those pain points. We conducted tests with people between the age of 30 – 50 to narrow down the pain points. NA’s target market includes actors’ and models’ parents as well as professionals from the entertainment industry:
The parents want to be reassured. Their kids must be represented by the best agency:
As for the professionals, they want to hire hard working and qualified talents:
-Rebuilt of the landing page.
-Remove any “warning” information or any superfluous indications.
-Showcase talents in a visually pleasing manner.
-Design an interface which reflected the company’s spirit.
We began putting our ideas of a new layout on paper keeping in mind the quality of the user flow. In order to be the most welcoming, the homepage had to as pure and clear as possible. The idea of keeping a video in the background was maintained but everything around had to disappear.
The first element to be removed was the black navigation bar. Only two tabs were left on the top right corner of the screen: “About” and “Contact”. Two more options were given to the user at the bottom of the screen: “Models” and “Actors”.
Those were initially on the top but placing them at the bottom give them more importance. The user feels like they have only two main choices and can, thus, easily see what they are looking for.
The video in the background is now a substantial focus and takes the entire screen. NA can show reels and shines more lights on their best talents. The space on the screen is not even blocked by the buttons as those have a reduced opacity.
We printed our wireframes to guerilla test our approach. Each person was given certain tasks to complete and asked to narrate their process as they browsed through the website.
The instructed scenario was that of a mother of a talented child who is looking for a talent agency that will understand herdemands. Some participants wished the “Actors” and “Models” tabs could allow the homepage to extend and show all the pictures.
Some others wanted to be able to click on pictures to see the talent’s full information.As a result, we took note of these suggestions to improve the other pages.
The logo in itself was fine but we adjusted the shades so it won’t be a clear contrast with the rest of the homepage. The colors of the logo ended up being selected to make the whole website uniform. Indeed, only two main colors were chosen.
Revamping a website means also rethinking the fonts. The initial fonts were plain and common. A handwriting style was selected to give a more natural and genuine feeling.
As for the titles, it was important that they should follow the see-through concept. The Colonna font illustrates perfectly this idea by offering a visual peak at the background through the cracks of the letters themselves.
- Gabriola, regular, 45px.
- Colonna MT , regular, 125px.
The homepage is extendable. If the user clicks on the bottom buttons the talent section appears. The user can scroll down from the homepage to select his talent. The pictures got enlarged to take all the available space. And on clicking, an overlay pops up describing the talent.
All the pages are uniformed and welcoming. The warning about the fees have been gathered up on the contact page where they belong. The user can take his time going through the information and fill up the form with full consent.
The user flow has never been better and the general feeling of the website has never been so positively loaded.
Here's the result:
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