Formerly known as Diversicare, Verve Senior Living manages 40+ retirement communities across Canada with a focus on redefining and reimagining what a retirement home can and should be. After they rebranded at the onset of the project we worked with them to redesign their marketing site and create a unified style for all of their individual properties (which had formerly all had separate websites). Getting everything under one umbrella allowed for a much more uniform and consistent experience. In addition to giving the site a full visual overhaul, we developed a much more engaging strategy that focused on allowing users to find a community and then get in touch and into the sales funnel, and facilitated the development of all of the 40+ community websites.
Project Date
May 2015
My Role
On this project I led design and established the style direction, led the project management side of things, and was actively involved in strategy throughout the process.
For this project we developed a fully functional HTML prototype that allowed us to walk the stakeholders through the new site and give them a better a sense of how specific interactions would work and how pages would scale responsively. In doing so, it allowed us to answer a lot of questions early on and get buy-in much sooner. Based on audience interviews that we conducted, our main strategic goals were to allow users to picture themselves in a Verve community, find the best community for them (whether by fit or location), and get in touch with that community to book a tour or get further information.
Style
Style Tile & Imagery
Stylistically we started from the brand guidelines that had recently been established and extrapolated from there. Our focus was on making the site feel very lively and friendly while feeling established and refined. For typography we paired a serif (Miller Display) with a highly readable sans-serif (Open Sans) for body copy. We wanted headlines to be attention grabbing but feel elegant and body copy to be as easy to read as possible as clarity was key for our target audience. We took the basic colour palette from the brand guidelines and fleshed it out a bit further to allow for a bit more flexibility and used their purple as our main colour and some of the brighter accent colours (orange, green, yellow) for more actionable items.
Imagery was to be a big part of the new site so establishing a clear direction for it was key. We wanted photos featured on the site to feel candid and natural and as bright and expressive as possible. Ultimately, visitors to the site would be looking to see themselves (or their parents) enjoying life in a Verve community, so getting photography down was paramount. Just like our type choices, iconography needed to be clear and easy to understand so we kept things very simple and approachable.
Here are a couple sections from the Style Tile I developed:
Design & Content
Responsive Mockups & Content Creation
Capturing the essence of Verve in our designs was a bit of a challenge and took a couple rounds of iterations but we ended up in a really great spot. We simplified our colour palette and placed more attention on whitespace and imagery. This made our pages feel a lot more refined and professional. For the Find A Community section of the site, we developed a highly interactive map that allowed users to find a community by name, city, or postal code and filter their results by the type of care they were looking for. After launch we re-examined this approach and, in addition to the map, added the ability for users to view communities in a list view and filter their results by province.
For the individual community pages consistency was key as, up until our involvement, all of their properties had independent and distinct websites. Getting a uniform style down for these took a lot of planning as we needed to ensure that we were covering all of our bases with the types of content we’d need to include while at the same time ensuring that we would be providing users with the best possible experience. That meant designing a flexible template that would work for all of their properties. Gathering content from each community for their respective pages was a challenge as well. We developed a series of guides for the various community managers to follow and collected and catalogued all of the content that came in. It took a great deal of organization, but we collected everything we needed and hit our deadline.
Here are a couple of the pages that we designed (Home, About Us, Community Page, Find A Community):
Results
Increase In Bookings & Qualified Leads
After launching the new site Verve saw a significant increase in tour booking requests for their communities which has led to more qualified leads. Our handling of the project was so successful that we were brought on for an additional maintenance agreement to manage the marketing site and the 40+ individual community pages as well.
Designed & Developed by Filament Creative.
Strategy: Stephen Megitt, Matt Hryhorsky, Trevor Davson Content & Copywriting: Stephen Megitt Design: Trevor Davson, Matt Hryhorsky, Lindsay Trevors, Kenzie Ryder Development: Stella Kim, Justin Kerr, Dave Fox, Taha Jalil, Brock Whitbread Project Management: Trevor Davson, Matt Hryhorsky
