13 Mar
How to Write a Web Design Case Study that Lands New Clients
This is one of the hardest challenges that a designer face when approaching prospective clients is to win the trust and confidence. If your prospective clients haven’t work with you before, they will hesitate to handover their work to you.
To win their trust and get the deal done you have to take some steps to assure that your design will not establish their brand but will also help them achieve their business objectives.
One of the greatest tools in a designer’s collection for overcoming this unique difficulty is the case study.
Case study tells about you and what you are capable of as a designer. They let you go to your prospective clients through contextual details of your existing project work, including your design brief, prototyping, and final product, so you can outline your creative strategy from conception to completion.
Moreover, they are the perfect tool for boosting the quality of proposals, building your web design portfolio, and adding credibility to your portfolio website. The best case study is based on explanations and documents behind the design, UX, and visual decisions. They offer more professional prospective into the design process that makes a business case for your work. This leaves you in a better point to prove your value to even the most uncertain client.
First Thing to do: Plan for your case study before time
Before we go deep into the kind of content that makes an amazing case study, I want you to know the importance of creating a case study for each and every project you work on.
Without a doubt this may seems like extra work, and this will require a lot of time to think about how to write about your projects and their success before you start working.
By this way you will end up the project with solid documentation that reflects your thinking, iterations, and key results as accurately as possible.
Let’s take a look at the five main elements that should be included in any case study.
5 main elements of a web design case study
1. The Overview
Consider your overview section as the executive summary of your case study. It allows your prospect to get quickly understand the highlights of your past work without reading the entire thing.
Moreover, this section should embrace the core takeaways from all other sections including the main problem, an overview of the solution, and the key results.
Overview will be the least detailed yet most important part of your case study. Only few of clients will read the complete case study, majority of them will just go through the overview to get the idea. Therefore, drafting a complete and well-articulated overview should be your topmost priority.
Tip: Write your overview section once the rest of your case study is completed. You can simply draft the main points and summarize it into one or two paragraphs.
2. The Context and Challenge
Now comes the second section of your case study which is known as Context and Challenges. This is designed to let your clients know the complete detailed description of the context that led to the creation of the project.
Hence if it’s well-written, the reader will easily understand the environmental factors and problems that you were hired to solve as a designer.
This section can be divided into three main elements:
a. Project background and description
The contextual information for the project including timelines, financial constraints, and the overarching purpose of the job.
b. The problem
The “why?” and the important point for the project. Your case study needs to clearly explain the problem that led to the onset of the project.
c. Project goals and objectives
Every website you work on should have perceptible goals and objectives associated with the project’s problem.
For example: Are you trying to drive more traffic to the site overall? Optimize product pages for lower bounce rate or higher conversions? Want to reduce cart abandon rates? No matter what your objectives are, try your best to include any quantifiable metrics that were known at the onset of the project.
3. The Process and Insight
The purpose of this section is to explain the design process, creative concept, and insight that led to your design decisions. Also, it is an opportunity to explain your clients the research, workflow, and repetitions of your design work.
While writing the content for this section you need to elaborate how you got from the challenge to the solution. Ensure the flow of information is logical with a core insight about your client’s audience, business, or industry. These insights can stalk from your client’s unique selling properties and key differentiators, or from their audience’s behavior and consumption habits.
To make sure that your reader decisively arrives at these insights as well, you need to research your document. You can include details about A/B tests, user research interviews, and key brainstorming takeaways that led you to uncover those crucial pieces of information.
Tip: Finding truth about your client’s audience can be one of the hardest challenges as a designer. Your client might have already researched about their customer which you can use or you can also do A/B testing to help guide your design decision.
4. The Solution
In this section you can show your skills and style as a designer. It’s your opportunity to feature samples of your work from videos, landing pages, custom integrations, and anything else you created for the project.
To really get the most from this section make sure to include written descriptions about your design work. Take time and clearly explain in detail your website’s defining features for example; it’s UX, navigation structure, content strategy, or unique mobile attributes.
Your writing efforts can make a reader feels confident in your designing skills therefore craft your document beautifully.
Tip: Don’t forget message is the medium hence don’t limit yourself to the screenshots only. Include animation videos, transitions or anything else that accurately represents your design can also work.
5. The Results
This section is crucial for an effectively written case study because for most business owners, it’s all about the numbers.
This results section will cover qualitative and quantitative success metrics from the project. If you have tested your product you must have a great metrics to share. The type of metric you report on can vary from one project to another, they should directly address the objectives you established in The Context and Challenge section.
Showing these results that you have in hand shows your prospects that your work had a direct influence on your clients in meeting their goals. By doing this, you’ll help them feel more comfortable putting their business (and their money) into your hands.
In addition, you can include testimonials too. When including your testimonials, however, keep them short and sweet. They can be as simple as one or two sentences, so long as they illustrate your previous client’s satisfaction with your work.
Tip: Make sure to collect testimonials from your client near the end of the project. Ask them to write about your process, creative thinking and the quality of work. Please ensure to get their permission to publish it.