xigxag web design & development

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) that is 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 technical lead of the project, Laura, the project manager, Neil (Digital Experience Lead), and Nick (UI & UX Lead), who were in charge of the site’s UX and UI design, and Callum, Justin and Dan, the team of developers that built the site.

Discovering the busy individual 

‘We started the project with a kick-off meeting, which involved discussing our company and our goals, followed by a mind-mapping session, wherein we really went into detail about our site’s target audience, what their needs were, and how we’re planning on fulfilling those needs.’ said Kelli. 

This session, run by Neil, uncovered their main user group: ‘The busy individual’ and secondary to this, a ‘Professional Retiree and the Visually Impaired’. 

Looking even deeper, Neil ‘identified clear needs and reasons why users were likely to purchase xigxag’s products; the one-off purchase would allow people the flexibility to buy when they were ready to buy. Audiobooks are a great form of escapism allowing people to detach slightly from their busy work and home lives, whilst allowing them to commute to and from work, during exercise (walks, solo sports), and even whilst doing household jobs’. 

During this stage, Laura collated all assets from brand guidelines, sketches and logos so that Hiyield designs the brand new website to be consistent with the visual identity of the mobile app.

Every screen, just one click away

Nick stated a clear initiative for xigxag’s web design based on the target user groups: to create a very clean and simple 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. This gave the xigxag team a visual reference for how much copy to write and how to tell the story. 

The site was simple to navigate with every screen just one click away from another, as well as making sure there is a clear Call to Action (CTA) button at all times.

This went through several iterations where Kelli said that Hiyield was ‘always willing to work with us and accommodate the changes that we wanted to make to the site. It was really exciting to watch their progress and how they were bringing the site to life through each iteration’.

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 has to offer. Here Nick designed a page with an intuitive scroll animation, along with the option for the user to ‘Browse by genre’ for increased ease.

High flexibility & API development

For the xigxag team to have full control over their site’s content and have full flexibility, the site was built using WordPress. The design was split up into ‘blocks’ so that they can 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 set up two APIs that made it possible to automatically pull the title, cover and description of over 30,000 books in their mobile apps database, and display it onto the website.

xigxag gained 4.5x more clicks and 67x more impressions

Hiyield pushed the site live after going through 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 gone on to successfully raise £500k in funding, doubling what they set out to achieve. And to top it all off, they have been selected by Vodafone as a “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.