Otter.ai is a nifty productivity tool. It turns voice recordings into searchable tagged transcripts in real time (via a great app and direct interface with Zoom and other services) and gets better and more accurate by applying ai to transcription.
Problem is, as good as Otter is at helping users capture the story of what happened in their call, their meeting or their zoom meeting, they haven’t been successful at telling their own.
Otter’s goals were simple: They wanted to convert visitors to users. And they wanted to look enterprise ready.
But there were design and content obstacles between visitors and Otter’s goals:
Also, though Otter had good insight about their user base, the site didn’t speak to their most important use cases. And with the onset of Covid-19, though Otter’s integrations with Zoom and Slack made it a potentially critical enabler of remote work, these UX fails stood in the way of customer acquisition and growth.
Because AI was the heart of the product, we made Otter’s innovate use of AI the hero of the story, centering transcription demonstrations in the site and animating them to illuminate uses.
We refocused site content on three critical use cases to ensure that the most important users saw themselves reflected in what Otter did. And we dramatically simplified those use cases so they could be scanned, not read.
Otter had a strong illustration system and an expanded color palette but they had lived in a blue world. As a result, their site seemed like just another generic SaaS wannabe.
We dug deep into their existing colors and developed a design direction that struck the same balance between warm and playful and ready-for-enterprise as Slack, Dropbox, Smartsheet and other successful SaaS brands.
We also shifted the site’s focus from all about Otter to customer-centricity, results-and-impact.
Because the site’s purpose was to convert visitors to users, and because (like most SaaS brands) Otter’s research had shown conversion was driven by trials, we helped Otter re-tool their CTA toward the benefit of the free offering.
Customers were invited to trial at the top of the page, but if they got to the bottom without action, we anchored the offer with a simple comparison of plans and emphasis of the incredible “600 free minutes forever” starter plan Otter offered.