Public Goods: Communicating the power of sustainable home goods through content and UX
Public Goods (PG) is a startup offering eco-friendly home goods. In 2019, I helped improve their content platform to attract customers through organic channels and reduce production costs. By optimizing user journeys, content delivery and site functionality, customer acquisition and engagement rose. I also led UX design efforts, creating pathways to convert readers into customers, developing educational strategies, and providing art direction and visual guidelines to enhance engagement.
Services
UX Design
Art Direction
Web Design
Client
Public Goods (Series A Home Goods Startup)
Audience
Environmentally-conscious consumers and potential customers interested in sustainability
Team
Internal Marketing (Content and Social), Internal Design, Engineering
Year
2019 – 2020
🌟 The Objectives:
The primary objective was to enhance Public Goods' content platform to educate readers on sustainable home practices, driving customer acquisition. At the time, sustainability was gaining traction as an appealing feature, but wasn’t yet fully recognized as a conversion driver. The goal was to educate potential customers about the value of these eco-friendly products to drive conversion.
The secondary objective was to streamline production costs and reduce strain on the internal content, freelance, design, and engineering teams. We found that the content team spent considerable time on content maintenance due to the lack of a unified content production strategy, which was an opportunity to improve efficiency and free up resources for more creative work.
🤝 The Deliverables:
Web and mobile screens, including Author Pages, Articles Archive, conversion banners, infographics
Conversion and engagement flows for the site, email, and lead magnets
Comprehensive Design Guidelines for content, including design system components, photography, and art direction guidelines
🥳 The Results:
Increased reader retention per month (over 400k)
Boosted customer acquisition rate per week (over 200 new customers)
Improved SEO rankings by utilizing new design components, enhancing visibility
Reduced production costs by leveraging freelance workforce and implementing reusable design components
Established design components and guidelines that are still used for email acquisition and on-site visuals
💡 The Process
As the design lead for enhancing the content platform, I worked closely with the Content Marketing, Lead Generation, and Development teams. My role was to create growth-centric assets and ensure alignment between marketing, design, and engineering. We used iterative feedback, digital analytics, and team retrospectives to refine the design and improve user engagement. Key partnerships included the head of content, for defining business goals, and the head of design, for ensuring brand consistency.
👩🏻💻 As the design lead I was…
Responsible for designing growth-centric assets
Optimized touchpoints for conversion
Created business-aligned design guidelines alongside marketing, design, and engineering
Synthesized insights from marketing and design teams to create a cohesive user experience
Led the design of reusable design components, including infographics, banners, and email flows
🤨 The primary challenge was…
A major challenge was balancing the visual strategy between the content team, who wanted more distinct visuals, and the design team, which preferred a minimalist approach aligned with e-commerce. The solution was to create components that could be reused across both teams without increasing the production load, reducing friction while maintaining the integrity of the brand.
🙌 Our impact…
By designing reusable assets and establishing clear guidelines, we streamlined production, reduced costs, and improved the customer acquisition funnel. This resulted in increased engagement and a more unified internal process.
📝 Project Summary
This project reinforced my ability to design scalable solutions that align with business goals while improving user engagement. In future roles, I can leverage these skills to streamline content creation processes and drive growth through design-focused user journeys.
