THE CHALLENGE
To create a new website to improve the company's
amount of scheduled classes and new students
Cia. de Dança Arkadah is a dance school from São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo. The company was founded back in 2008 and offer classes to dancers of all ages, like ballet, jazz dance, urban dances, baby classes and others.
PROJECTS AND RESULTS
research
The first step was to hold a kick-off meeting with the company’s leadership to understand the business goals for the project. Once our main objectives were validated — increasing reach and boosting enrollments — I conducted a benchmarking research to analyze how competitor companies communicated on their websites and how they structured their online enrollment or class scheduling processes.
wireframes
After gathering insights and market references, I created the wireframes, carefully aligning each screen with the company’s business goals.
Alongside the wireframes, I developed the site flow and a style guide featuring the brand’s new color palette.
The goal was to give the website a more modern and vibrant look, using bolder colors and more angular components to reflect the updated visual identity.
prototypes
Once the wireframes were approved, it was time to bring the prototypes to life using the components from the style guide and professional photos provided by the company. All copywriting was revised and optimized to attract new students. I also highlighted one of the school’s strongest assets — its live performances — by embedding videos from past events on one of the pages.
Another important addition was the inclusion of a form for scheduling trial classes, making the experience more seamless and actionable for potential students.
development
The entire process was documented in Figma, including the style guide.
In addition to leading the design and experience strategy, I’m also responsible for the site’s no-code development using the Wix platform, where the website is hosted.
The development phase is still in progress, so we don’t have measurable results yet in terms of bookings or website traffic.
Blocks & difficulties
Low UX and Design maturity
Because it was a new area, I had some difficulty on introducing the theme within the product and tech teams. Before this, all of the process and software flows were built by the dev team, that did'nt bring any user experience vision to the projects. Becaus of that, when I tried to improve and apply some changes on our routine, I foun it difficult to fin support by POs and product specialists. The solution was to make litte improvements that showed positive impact soon. That way, I could show UX value to the company and inside the solutuion.
Low seniority and strategic vision (me)
This was my first experience as a UX Designer, so I still didn't have a very strategic vision about process and projects on the begining. Also, I wasn't having help from a more experienced Designer, like a senior. That's why all of the process and projects were being tested on practice. After some time, with a better UX background (and a lot of study and networking with other designers), I felt that I was more prepared and confident as a designer to try out new methodologies and work on my pitch to the product team.
Feedback
“Larissa knows our work and our business from inside out, since we've already worked together before and she is now the responsible for our communication and media for the past few years. She is the only one I trust to build our brand and communication channels, knowing that she will succeed in showing our culture and values. Since we made some pontual improvement on our past website, we had more access and mor messages from people who were interested in our classes.”
