The new marketplace will ensure you have easy access to tools and products you need to build and launch your website. And that you’re able to tap web professionals when needed and receive insight to grow and evolve your online presence.

We’ll be documenting our process via this blog series to offer a window into our design and development process. Our hope is that by following along we might provide a spark of inspiration for your project.

First up, we’re covering our re-branding and design process. Please enjoy this write up by MOJO Marketplace’s Creative Director Mike Miller.

New Branding

To align with our long term vision and the future of MOJO Marketplace, we’re making a number of changes to our identity and the visual representation of the brand. Let me answer your first question right away – No, we’re not dropping Horatio the Green Monster! We’ve simply decided that as we grow and continue to identify ways to help small business and entrepreneurs, we need to instill trust and confidence in our customers. A streamlined identity package will help us in those efforts. Horatio will from time to time, make an appearance as more of a guide and commentator to help you in your journey.

Marketplace 2.0

In the early stages of planning for 2017 and our brand vision for MOJO, we sat down and spoke with our entire team to learn about major sticking points for our customers. Using your feedback provided by our Support and WP Live teams, we identified which areas needed improvement and where we could make major strides in user experience. Our singular goal at MOJO is to make the best marketplace experience possible, which in turn positively impacts your ability to do more with your online presence.

Design

Light, fresh and contemporary. Our design should inspire confidence in you and relay the fact MOJO is an authority in design and development. We expect our site should embody the best of design and user experience. We’ve moved from Bold typefaces to convey importance in headers and top level page identifiers. Opting for a lighter, higher contrast version of the same font using color and sizing to portray hierarchy and importance. This has created a much more contemporary look and gives the items in the marketplace a freshly enthusiastic feel while helping you review and analyze information more efficiently.

Search

One of the major keys to you successfully finding the items you need to launch your project is highly effective search. Our Version 1 search tools were basic and did not accurately provide results unless exact terms were queried. In some instances, such as a search for “Business”, results were okay. But in other, more specific queries like “Creative Photography WordPress Theme” the results become foggy and sometimes non-existent. With our Version 2 search we’ll improve heavily in a number of ways including contextual search within a specific category of the site. ie: Search: WordPress Themes. We are very excited to get your feedback on how this will help you source the products and services you need to meet your online goals.

Global User Experience

One of the key principles we focused on for this project is to reduce friction. Friction causes frustration and impacts your effectiveness, ultimately leading to unnecessary delays in your project. Our new design, while not a vast departure from the typical marketplace structure, has been adapted to provide greater context, better filtering and minimal distraction.Account Center

One of the major weaknesses of MOJO’s Version 1 is the user account center. It has been changed and adapted as the marketplace grows and our service offerings evolve with the 21st century web. We’ve thrown out the old and re-envisioned an account center the feels like an account center. Truly a back of site component that provides purchase history, installation count, messages and more at a single glance. Overall reducing the number of clicks to get top level information about your MOJO account. This creates happy users. We love happy users

User on-boarding

The bulk of MOJO’s traffic comes from our strategic brand partners such as Bluehost, HostGator and iPage. Often times you come to MOJO with a specific intent of installing WordPress or another popular CMS platform. We’ve identified that our onboarding process has been a point of friction, bounce, and frustration for our customers. In the next version of MOJO, we’ve attempted to address these issues, creating a much more fluid experience. Our aim is to create context and keep you well taken care of as you progress through installation, browsing the marketplace, and into your account center.

The creative and UX teams at MOJO are very excited to get this new marketplace in the hands of our community. We are thrilled and thankful to have your support and hope that the next chapter for MOJO has great impact on your day to day interaction on the site and improves your lives through ease of use that translates to your success.

– Mike Miller
Creative Director

Thanks for reading! Have any thoughts or questions? Let us know in the comments. And be on the lookout for more MOJO Marketplace Version 2 posts as we share with you our process and long term vision.

JR Farr
Founder and CEO