We’ve been really fortunate that Linktree has grown rapidly in four years – we’re thrilled that over 3.5 million people around the world use our tool to share their content online.
While we were busy growing the product, one thing hadn’t changed much in that time: our website. We’re now excited to share our rebrand with the community.
For the Linktree team, this feels like a new school term. Over the last few years, we’ve focused so closely on scaling our teams, the product, our tech and rolling out the PRO package, that our website (or the ‘marketing’ site) remained essentially as it was when we launched.
It was the MVP we rolled out in our infancy, back when we were psyched to see friends of friends using Linktree. Now 4 years later, we’re working with global brands like Red Bull, Qantas and L’Oreal, artists such as Selena Gomez, Pharrell and Justin Bieber, as well as top gun marketers like Seth Godin and Gary Vee, it was high time we renovated the front door to our product. And of course, we’re still thrilled that our friends use Linktree. <3
When we were young. It’s like looking back at old school photos – we feel fond of what we had, but have grown beyond it. And wear better glasses.
Good branding reflects the mission of the company – it’s something that some of the brands we admire most excel at, like Mailchimp, Twitch and WeTransfer. Linktree UI designer, Dan Taplin, is fascinated by “how a brand demonstrates its personality and tone of voice through design”.
How do you brand a product that is for everyone? As we have grown, our user base has become incredibly broad – from new-to-social learners who might be using our Free tool, through to digital agencies and brands running hundreds of social accounts with PRO, we wanted our brand to resonate with them, and every slice in between.
To get the process under way, we analysed site data to better understand how to evolve, and spent a lot of time learning about our users and the landscape. From there our design team got sketching. And sketching…
One of the biggest challenges we encountered is being able to effectively, visually and quickly demonstrate the technical smarts behind a seemingly straight-forward tool. We didn’t want to overwhelm our audience with excess detail on first meeting, but we’re also really proud of the tech behind our product, in a category we created.
Dan admits that the design team “had a tough time creating imagery and video assets to explain how Linktree works, without assuming prior knowledge from the site’s visitors”. But we knew communicating the product’s function had to be front and centre.
What Dan, and our creative director Nick Humphreys, came up with is a series of animations which educate our visitors on:
We exist to streamline our users’ online ecosystems, the site graphics are designed to communicate how Linktree unifies the fragmented digital landscape. Knowing that Linktree is a global product, we removed, where possible, content reliant on language to communicate features and purpose. The result is colourful, abstracted animations that can speak to the entire spectrum of our audience.
We are advocates for a more inclusive and accessible internet, available to everyone – it’s why Linktree will always have a free offering. In research for the new site, we went deep on getting to know about accessibility issues. “It has been really enlightening”, says Nick, “and we’ll be working our learnings into future product updates too.”
For the new site, we made sure that text is legible and navigation is clearly visible. We tested to ensure the important visual elements have sufficient contrast for visually-impaired visitors and that alt-text is written into the code of the website to aid people who use screen reading tools.
"Going deep on accessibility has been enlightening. We'll be working our learnings into the product."
Naturally, the site’s aim is to drive conversion – we hope our visitors choose to join us. As the product itself is designed to reduce friction, we approached the marketing site in the same way – the result is a design solution that gives a visitor the ability to test their individual username and sign up instantly.
Early data is telling us this entry point is where visitors are converting most, showing the importance of contextual design. Our hypothesis has been confirmed to be an effective conversion driver.
Something that gives us warm fuzzies, is that this really was a company-wide effort. From gaining context and insight into the product to brainstorming, getting feedback and copy edits we’ve worked right the way across our product and engineering, marketing, social, partnerships, customer success and design teams. The process really cemented how much brand impacts the people within the company as well as outside of it.
The brand will be ever-evolving – really this is just the start of an exciting journey for us, and for our community. We hope you like it – we’d love to hear your feedback over on Twitter!
Credits
