Project: Redesign frumster.com to increase usability, grow membership and create revenue growth Position: Project Manager, Lead Design Year: 2004 Asset Deliverables: See below
"We are deeply grateful for the incredible job you have done for us and equally grateful for your flexibility...it will most likely add tremendous value to Frumster."
— Ben Rabizadeh, Manager of Operations, Frumster, Inc.
Love is a Business
Within the first week of the redesign, Frumster increased its membership and conversion to premium paying customers by 15% - 20%. AKGold refocused and repositioned Frumster to meet its revenue goals creating a superior product that is easy to use. As a result of AKGold's efforts, Frumster's membership, revenues and profits have all steadily increased.
With Frumster singles can find their soul mates using the best system on the Internet. Frumster, a Jewish dating service, wanted to position itself as the leading Jewish dating service in the world. It had excellent technology developed in Israel on the back end, however, the interface lacked focus, clarity, ease-of-use and core branding.
Love Hurts
Frumster had spent six months of wasted time, money and energy working with web designers and programmers who created a flawed interface and technical enhancements that set Frumster back six months. Frumster turned to AKGold due to his over 9 years of proven experience with clients such as Bank of America, Cisco Systems and AllBusiness.
Finding the Right Partner
AKGold quickly recognized the flaws in their strategy and system and assured Frumster that AKGold would complete the project on time and in budget, working within the current system parameters. AKGold established the goals for this project:
Redesign the interface to Frumster to make it highly engaging, professional, consistent and extremely intuitive.
Plan for the future growth of Frumster.
Integrate the new design into the current technical system.
The three core spheres for accomplishing the project were Information Architecture, Visual Design and Technical Implementation.
Information Architecture
This phase consisted of defining the goals for the Frumster redesign, characterizing the audience, pinpointing the key areas for supporting the sales process, analyzing the competition, defining applicable web technology, creating a series of flow charts and preparing the content for integration into the site.
Visual Design
The Visual Design phase consisted of a complete design analysis, exploration of design angles and navigational layouts, distilling these into a single thematic focus, followed by completion of design elements and then the preparation of the html templates.
Technical Implementation
Often times systems are put together by several programmers with gaps in consistency. In redesigning a system, AKGold had to intimately understand Frumster's current system that used PHP and a MySQL database run on Linux. The three parts to this phase consisted of the preliminary technical assessment, the actual technical implementation and the assurance of the integrity of quality.
Thanks to AKGold's talent, process, focus, and experience, Frumster redeployed its new site three months in advance of their timeline. This enables singles from all over the world to find each other and for Frumster to increase its membership base and its revenues from premium memberships, events, and advertising. You could say it was a match made in heaven.
