Web Presence for Mothers with Self-Owned Businesses

Pepperlane provides its members a simple website to showcase their services without any specialized design or coding skills.

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Guided Website Creation

I led several user interviews at first to discover how our users preferred to navigate between states and update their pages. Whether they were new to their business or already had their own website elsewhere, users wanted to be guided through the process while also free to choose any aspect of their website to tackle next. The final result was a "live" editing experience allowing users to view their changes in real-time, along with plenty of helper text and examples in context. Once shipped, this was continually updated and monitored via FullStory to reduce friction and successfully improve the users' time to completion.

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With over half our visitors coming from mobile—and many not in the ownership of a dedicated computer themselves—we wanted to make sure that a user could get her website up and running on any device she might have. One member had said that she had started and completed her website all from the sidelines of her son's soccer game.

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Throughout the site, we emphasized authentic photography: showcasing the woman behind the business rather than her business's logo or an avatar.

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Many users who were new to their businesses or had been out of the workforce for some time said they felt that they needed a logo or additional branding to feel "official." These feelings could hamper their confidence (and were usually the biggest roadblocks to conversion and finishing their sites), so encouraging portraiture and personal details like their kids and interests were included to take the pressure off mothers to appear as anything other than themselves.

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Onboarding

In our user interviews, the team found that members came to our site for more reasons than could fit in a single onboarding flow. While the UI could help the user create an account and complete a website, many users had to defeat low self-confidence and real-world roadblocks to sell their services. Because of this, the onboarding funnel consisted of 1) a digital experience and 2) a personable human one. Therefore, throughout the path to membership, we included as many potential touchpoints with humans at Pepperlane as possible.

Our visitors needed to see the faces of actual members before they saw their first sign-up form. We wanted them to see themselves with us as much as we wanted to know who they were through creating their profile.

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