employing digital trickery to get more people to prepare for natural disasters.
Hello my loves! Today, we are no longer going into the Amanda emo thoughts spiral. Instead, I wanted to take a high level overview of Faura’s latest landing page design and how we used simple UI/UX stuff to convince homeowners to prepare their homes for disaster.
Being a startup CTO really is a different job every single day, and each task is somewhat interconnected and vaguely related to screens. This is true for most companies, as they start off with high-capacity generalists and then transform to niche specialists in order to dial down details and scale out operations.
For me, what I own as the CTO of Faura right now is:
- What are we building
- How fast are we building it
- Are we sure we need to build it?
- How much money are we spending doing it?
- What even is it?
Those are pretty vague, but the whole job is about working through those vague details and turning it into a tangible business.
Let me go over really quickly how Faura works before I go into our changes. Any senior developer worth their salt will tell you that decision making is useless without business context, so this is the business context..
Faura develops natural disaster survivability assessments for homes.
Some people don’t know this, but there are things that we can tangibly do to protect our homes from most natural disasters. When we started Faura, we found there was this giant disconnect in between government officials who were in charge of informing people, and homeowners who needed that information.
A lot of the learnings someone needs to protect their homes are buried in pages of research, confusing, or not given a marketing budget enough to make it really shine.
Overall, we think preparing homes for natural disaster is a people problem. We have to build a product that makes it really easy for the every day person to assess their home, and then take actions that help them figure out what they need to do.
On the enterprise side, insurance companies are increasingly dropping homes and losing out on money because they can’t distinguish structures from their general nature disaster risk.
A home that’s made out of only concrete is definitely going to fair better than one made out of wood, but insurers increasingly don’t know. Valkyrie is definitely the one to talk to about insurance though, and you can find a great article she wrote on the issue here.
Faura provides them with another layer of data on top of risk that will help them hopefully choose who to insure in high risk areas, providing an incentive for people to complete natural disaster mitigation work.
Aside from insurance, there’s so many other uses for a tool like this, and I’m a believer it will be a central part of our climate adaption future.
Government bodies give out grants all of the time to complete this work, future home buyers want to know the survivability of a home before they close, and a large part of our climate adapted futures is going to be about where people can safely stay.
Not only do we want to build a beautiful product for all stakeholders, we want to build a database of survivability of as many homes in the US as we can.
Therefore, we need a lot of people to take our surveys.
We create custom ones for our insurance clients, but we have a wind, wildfire, and hail assessment up on our site for anyone to take. But, the website has been pretty ugly and not really doing much for us.
Here it was when we started testing last July:
Pre-rebrand:
Draft of rebrand:
After rebrand:
I was in charge of redoing the entire landing page, and I finished it in about a week of coding in between constant travel. I’ve done all of our landing pages, and this is definitely the one that took the most time to perfect.
Let me just say, the landing page isn’t pixel perfect, and the screenshot doesn’t capture it all. But alas, other JIRA tickets await my hand.
A lot of the smaller animations aren’t included, but close your eyes and imagine swooshes and tasteful slow gradient animations.
1 — From the start, the first thing you’ll notice on our old landing page is a lack of branding and ‘proof’. We fixed that.
Not that it was totally separated from our branding guidelines, but we didn’t make who we are clear, and why you should trust us. When you’re working with people’s homes and telling them how to prepare for disasters, that trust is incredibly integral.
We added that proof through our info library, more clear branding to make it obvious we’re a company and not a data miner, references to other homeowners and parters in the space, and links for them to research us before diving in.
2- We also didn’t really prepare people for what the assessment was gonna be, or provide a lot of context for why they should do it.
We covered the basics of it with the copy, but a lot of what convinces people is visual.
In our new landing page, we showed disasters, the assessment tool, our partners in the space, and even linked to enterprise customers a hint of our data analytics tools.
Overall we added:
- Imagery of natural disaster to link it to the very real risk, in contrast with our cozy warm branding.
- Logos of the companies in the space who we’ve worked with. We recently secured a partnership with XPrize as a resource for them, so being able to cross promote is super helpful for us both.
- More visual paint cues to link it back to our specific brand to separate the page and create a more cohesive navigation journey. I drew these back when we first started on my iPad in procreate, and we’ve used them in branding ever since. Our branding is beautiful, but the same colors and desaturated images over and over again do not make things stand out. The visual cues the rings to signal the assessment, and the watermarks to signal importance / navigation.
- Clear “AHA” visual of the assessment. You can see a question, and then the end solution to it. This is super important, because there’s a lot of language that can be used to describe Faura.
- A step by step process of what someone would expect and how we would provide value.
3 — We need to provide value beyond the tool to establish trust, and credibility.
We write articles for SEO on our main Faura site. Because our landing page was built in Flutter for time, it doesn’t have any of the SEO grip a traditional web-based framework would.
So, we have a bit of a weird funnel where we couple two sites together and let the traffic pass through. In the future, we need a React.js web redesign. But for now, we use the info library to gain trust, drive SEO and traffic to our main Faura site, and as content in our action items when the survey is done.
4- We needed to improve our terrible assessment selection component.
Initially, we had cards for each natural disaster we were covering. It worked back when we had one, but we’re drastically expanding the amount of assessments, and the ways people can use them. So, we wanted a widget that was compact but still flexible enough to grow to all of the disasters we want to serve in the future.
We landed on what you see: A simple box with visual cues that tell you we’re going to help you protect your home, as well as a clear segmented button that helps you choose a natural disaster. The goal was to package it as one CTA with options, as opposed to MULTIPLE CTAs.
For our homeowners coming through from an insurance referral, they use the invite code button.
It definitely has room to change in the future, but I think it definitely looks cleaner and is a more compact CTA. We’re able to reuse it across different areas in a way we just didn’t have the spatial ability to do with cards.
Overall, it’s not 100% perfect to me. But it’s definitely a step closer, and we’ll continue to tweak it as time goes on. So much of what this company rests on is getting homeowners to understand the importance of assessing their home.
As we go forward, I want us to include more data about saving homes, reduction in insurance rates, and more clear language about the fact action items can even be things people do for free.
Preparing our homes for climate change will include all of us, and this tool is just a start.
Valkyrie and I just finished our first company retreat in Flagstaff, and we stood over the Grand Canyon. I think in our own ways, we both then remembered how sacred the earth is to us, and that we are intrinsically tied to it.
That’s what this is all about, right? Our world is changing because of us, and we need to figure out how to change with it.
I’m happy to be able to have complete creative control over this, and I love to dissect my old work and to keep building it up. The entire front-end codebase (and a solid chunk of the backend) has been my doing, down from the Faura logo, and including every UI component and the overall architecture that drives this.
We’re in a period of transition as we hire a development team that will take this to the next level, but I loved the ability to create things with my brain alone for the future of our world.
