Last week I took you through the Highrise signup chart redesign.

This week I want to talk about part of the Highrise home page redesign that we’ve already redesigned. The design is alive – we’re making a lot of small tweaks post launch.

Original: In the cards

When we launched the new Highrise site, we had a block in the middle of the page that looked like this:

Three “cards” as we call them. Each card highlighting a major feature of Highrise. The idea was to rotate these cards every once in a while. They looked good and gave the page a nice splash of color, but they didn’t communicate very well. We were using 163,566 pixels, but we weren’t really saying anything.

Redesigned: In the icons

So we decided to make a change. Instead of using all that space to advertise three features, we thought we’d try using it to communicate eight benefits instead. So in a couple hours we came up with this:

Eight benefits, concisely explained, each with an icon for some color and identity. Now that block says something. There’s more to swallow, but it’s easy going down. And it’s only 98 pixels taller than the cards design. Here’s the overlay (the red is the extra height):

Trading 688 for 98

The other thing we were able to do is remove an entire wordy section from the bottom of the page. This section used to take up 688 vertical pixels. Wordcount was a few hundred words.

We were able to get the same points across better with the eight benefits/icons we showed above, plus save 590 pixels of vertical space and hundreds of words. We think that’s a good trade.

More intensity, better density

In the end, we’re really happy with the change. We’ve received a good bit of positive feedback from customers too. We increased the information density, but made the information clearer and more easily digestible. We’re very happy with that.