I led a quick 3 week redesign of the Evernote homepage in 2013. The goal was to refresh the brand image to reflect it's modern, award winning products in a simple and clear way, while also highlighting key announcements and product launches to keep regular users up to date on the latest happenings.
Evernote had grown to over 100MM users and many of those had come in through evernote.com. The goal was to do a very quick redesign that focused on this simplicity and drove registration through one clear call to action. The homepage was lacking focus and a singular focus. Rather than talking about everything that was happening at Evernote, we decided to focus in on the biggest set of users—those trying to register or sign in.
We shot all of the product photography in house and placed it on a virtual desk with other objects that spoke to the orderliness of the Evernote workspace. The homepage was a responsive design that not only responded to the browser's size, but also customized apps and devices based on the browser and even operating system that was accessing the site. No more mac centric product photography for windows users.
At first we had this great idea that all of the objects on the home page would be physical product you could buy in the Evernote Market (which was launched on the same day). You could click on each item and navigate directly to the store to buy it. This added way too much distraction from the main CTA, and the click-through rate was way too low. We removed these links a week after launch and optimized for one clear CTA—Create an account.
The promo spaces at the bottom were distracting from the one thing that most people were looking to do - sign up for an Evernote account, or sign in to the account they already had. What people were really wanting was more information about what Evernote was and how they could use it. Newer versions took this into account. We completely redesigned again in late 2014 after having learned from these designs.
