— Case studies
xigxag
‘We wanted to have a dramatic improvement in our website, but we didn’t have the resources to do it ourselves. So, we decided to hire Hiyield to develop a professional website for us.’ – Kelli Fairbrother, CEO of xigxag
xigxag
Within a month, xigxag's website gained 4.5x more clicks and 67x more impressions.
xigxag is a startup that is disrupting the publishing market.
Worth an estimated $100B, going head to head with big players such as Amazon, Audible
Their main differentiator: xigxag has ‘the most advanced digital reading app in the market, with a proprietary listen-and-read x-book® concept with a mobile app at its core’. X-book, along with a user-first experience, flexible pricing & rewards for listening, clearly shows a competitive advantage.
Founded by Mark and Kelli in 2019, the xigxag mobile app is live with over 30,000 titles and a rapidly growing user base. But, as they grew, it was clear that xigxag needed a scalable, stress-free content management system (CMS) central to their marketing.
‘We set up a meeting with them and right off the bat, they seemed really credible and they understood what we wanted to do with our site. They also showed us a couple of great projects that they’d done in the past, which made us feel like they would be a good fit for us.’
Meet the Hiyield team: Matt, CTO, the project’s technical lead. Laura, the project manager. Neil, the Digital Experience Lead. Nick, the UI & UX Lead in charge of the site’s UX and UI design. And Callum, Justin and Dan, the team of developers who built the site.
Nick stated a clear initiative for xigxag’s web design based on the target user groups: to create a clean and straightforward website with easy navigation and to tell the story of what xigxag is and why a user should use download their app.
Working with xigxag’s brand guidelines, Nick used their colour pallet and typeface to create a set of wireframes on a design platform called Figma. The wireframes helped give the xigxag team a visual reference of how much copy to write.
The site was simple to navigate, with every screen just one click away from another, ensuring there was a clear Call to Action (CTA) at all times.
The wireframes went through several iterations where Kelli said that Hiyield was ‘always willing to work with us and accommodate the changes we wanted to make to the site. Watching their progress and how they were bringing the place to life through each iteration was exciting.’.
A core feature that the xigxag team wanted to achieve was to have a page that represents a catalogue of all the books the mobile app offers. Nick designed a page with an intuitive scroll animation and the option for the user to ‘Browse by genre’ for increased ease.
Every screen, one click away.
Nick stated a clear initiative for xigxag’s web design based on the target user groups: to create a clean and straightforward website with easy navigation and to tell the story of why use xigxag.
Working with xigxag’s brand guideline, Nick used their colour pallet and typeface to create a set of wireframes on a design platform called Figma. The wireframes also helped give the xigxag team a visual reference of how much copy to write.
The site was simple to navigate, with every screen just one click away from another, ensuring there was a clear Call to Action (CTA) button at all times.
The wireframes went through several iterations where Kelli said that Hiyield was ‘always willing to work with us and accommodate the changes we wanted to make to the site. Watching their progress and how they were bringing the place to life through each iteration was exciting.
A core feature that the xigxag team wanted to achieve was to have a page that represents a catalogue of all the books the mobile app offers. Nick designed a page with an intuitive scroll animation and the option for the user to ‘Browse by genre’ for increased ease.
High flexibility & API development
The site uses WordPress for the xigxag team to have complete control over its content. The design was split up into ‘blocks’ so that they could create, add, edit and move content around while always staying in line with the UX & UI design best practices.
To achieve the catalogue part of the site, Hiyield’s development team set up two APIs that enabled it to automatically pull the title, cover and description of over 30,000 books in their mobile apps database and display it on the website.
“Throughout the project, we did some back and forth iterations; they would send us designs, we’d sign off on them, and then their development team would make the appropriate changes.”
Tech stack:
- WordPress
- Guttenberg blocks
- TailwindCSS
- Algolia API
xigxag gained 4.5x more clicks and 67x more impressions
Hiyield pushed the site live after a testing process on a pre-live version of the site.
“We’re really pleased with how the site turned out. We’re already seeing the impact of Hiyield’s work — we saw almost 4.5x more clicks and 67x more impressions from our site within a month. So far, we’ve only indexed 17% of our site’s pages, so we are expecting those numbers to still increase. They provided great value for our money. They deliver high-quality work at a lower price, which we think is one of the biggest benefits” said Kelli.
xigxag raises over £500k, doubling their target & signed a Vodafone partnership
Not only have xigxag’s website and app seen positive effects, but the team have raised £500k in funding, doubling what they set out to achieve. And to top it all off, they have been selected by Vodafone as an “Independent Pick” partner on Vodafone’s VeryMe app!
xigxag’s website, app, team and vision continue to push the startup into a bright future, where Hiyield continues to help with the UX & UI design for a mobile app refresh.
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