Case Study: Dotcal. Web Design for a Booking Service
How can you use design to stand out among the competition, to become visible and trendy? The designer team at Outcrowd knows the answer.
We invite you to take a look at our work on a case that successfully solves the problem of separating from the competition through unique design and improved UX, makes the service easier to use, and meets the client's requirements. The case also offers an example of a client with a responsible approach to the development of their product.
Client
Dotcal is a call booking service. It offers the user a set of personalized templates for booking meetings. The company’s mission is to replace emailing and make planning enjoyable for the users. Unlike other similar services, Dotcal enables users to create individual designs for call pages.
Target audience
Ambitious, creative, goal-oriented people aged 25–40 who strive to optimize their schedule, save time, and also make a good impression on their clients/partners/employers. They want to use modern digital products, look stylish and organized.
Project
Our task was to develop branding and a promo website for the template platform. The promo website consists of a home page, Pricing, and Contact Us.
Branding
In this case, the client had a certain vision of what the design should be. This sped up the process and helped to point us in the right direction. The client envisioned their project in the style of minimalist, clean designs by Squarespace, Typeform, Villa.
- logo
For the new logo, we chose a laconic design in black and white. We used Ogg font with a customized “d” to preserve the conceptual idea of the dot. This logo is visually more interesting, stylish, and attractive:
- style
We looked for a solution that would perfectly match the tastes of the target audience, help them solve their problems, and be in line with the client’s vision. This led us to a stylish minimalist design using bright, clear, contrasting colors.
This palette is psychologically associated with a positive attitude and encourages productivity. The style is simple and laconic, broadcasting clarity, energy, and organization. It makes the job of working with calendars and bookings much easier, adding enjoyment and convenience.
The same style is used for social media, message templates, and the Affiliate Guide.
Website
While designing the moodboard and studying style references, we opted for clean and high-contrast website examples. In each version, we looked for what would work toward our goals: ease of use and visual lightness coupled with exclusivity.
Separating from the competition: solution
The main task was to identify the idea, the thing that makes our service special and exciting.
What helped us was an in-depth look at the target audience. We are very grateful to our client for providing us with detailed user portraits. Such as:
A designer named Esther, aged 25–35, is fashionable in many aspects of her life. She lives in New York City and values and cares a lot about the image and the look of her brand and herself, as well as the products she uses. She wants to continue to schedule meetings, but do it in a way that matches her taste in design.
Jose is a sales manager, aged 30–40, and he wants to keep his team’s clients happy. He wants to free up his reps’ time so that they can focus more on selling. He doesn’t want to offend their clients by sending them a sterile link that puts all the work on them to find a slot.
After studying these and other portraits, we knew what we needed to do to attract the audience. And that was to create a mirror reflection of their images, presented in the most flattering light. We decided to use vivid, eye-catching photographs of people. The characters in the photos are a visual and psychological match to the images and personalities of the target audience, inspiring and motivating them to use the product. The photographic portraits and the high-contrast color palette make the website lively and friendly.
All the design elements convey the company style and give the website an integrated, coherent, and structured look. This makes using the service easier and more enjoyable.
Project specifics
The client would often provide feedback via Loom, which was very useful and fun. Sometimes they would record several videos by different people. Feedback is essential for any project to succeed. Working via Loom turned out to be both productive and entertaining.
For us, it was a useful and enjoyable collaborative experience. We are deeply grateful to the Dotcal team for this productive cooperation. Please feel free to check out the results: dotcal.co
In conclusion
The Dotcal case is a good example of how the client’s preparedness affects the speed and outcome of the work. When the client knows exactly what they want and has clearly defined requests, the project will meet and even exceed all expectations.
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