Overview
The Challenges
Challenge 1: Learning to collaborate effectively with another designer
Challenge 2: Making the site “Look Good”
Updating the website for Vigilus, A Louisiana based software development company.
A revisit and revamp on the Vigilus Software website, THE awesome Louisiana based software development firm.
My Responsibilities
UX Research
Collaboration
Leading Meetings
High and Low fidelity designs
Figma
Photoshop
Tools
Website
Platform(s)
December 2024 - March 2025
Timeline
The Process
How my designs solved each challenge
Project Background
Years ago, while working Vigilus, I designed their first website. I was quite inexperienced at the time and the designs were certainly usable but not amazing. Years later, the company grew and needed a better website. Fortunately, I too grew as a designer. This project afforded me two opportunities. The first was to work with an amazing designer named Lauren. The other was to evaluate my old work in a way I had never until then with my improved skills.
1
Need Finding
2
Research
3
Ideation
4
Final Designs
5
Retrospective
Challenge
1
Learning to collaborate effectively with another designer
My core strategy going into this design collaboration was to clearly articulate my design decisions. To do so I questioned everything I did and thought more deeply about the reason behind my decisions so that I can better communicate them. I also found that it pushed me to try more alternatives to ensure confidence in what I settled on. My work quality improved a lot due to this. I was also much more confident when communicating with my fellow designer and stakeholders.
This strategy was a core tenant of Tom Weever’s “Articulating Design Decisions” and I was finally able to practice those principles during this project.
Challenge
2
Updating the styling and feel of the Vigilus website
I designed the original Vigilus website many years ago. Here are a few key things we identified when evaluating the problems with the Vigilus Website:
The font choice worked yet was bland
The website had many hard to scan walls of text
The card and button designs felt flat and were visually unappealing
The white space was mismanaged
The hierarchies needed improvement
The colors needed to be pushed
There was a big lack of visual aids
The “Careers” page shows two things. First, tough this page’s structure remained mostly unchanged it demonstrates the distinctly different feel the text changes had on the site. Second, the hierarchies were changed to address the cramped feeling across much of the old design. Bold descriptor text being close to a title competes for attention, which distracts from the more important areas any user should be looking at.
Walls of text were a huge issue with the website. Information should be displayed in a digestible and approachable manner. Walls of text are neither of these things. Here we used bullet points, shorter paragraphs, and the many visual elements on the page to make quickly processing and understanding easier.
We added the gradient, the outline, and the “learn more” text to address the styling and readability issues. This also draws the eye to the cards more, which was an important consideration we accounted for. The other designer came up with the idea of using the gradients and adding the drop shadow to the card, whereas my contribution was expanding on the original gradient idea and making this blue one and adding the outline.
This section covers the two final issues mentioned at the start of this section: the buttons and lack of imagery. Adding the image for the project was a no brainer. An image adds a ton of visual intrigue, grabs the users attention better, and gives that important first impression of what is being viewed.
The button and filter changes didn’t just improve the section visually but also hierarchically. The filled in button commands attention and incentivizes the user to click it. Before, the tags had grabbed the users attention to much by being filled in. This took away attention from the button, where we want the user to click. With the adjustments, the image and button draw more attention, as they should.cc
We also shortened the descriptor text to create a less intimidating text wall of text, an issue that we addressed in many places of the site.
These changes culminate in a section both more readable and visually intriguing, two very important metrics Vigilus has. We cannot expect users to read about the work we’ve done if its not visually digestible.
Personal Challenges and Reflections
It was a pleasure collaborating with a great designer and having ample time to perfect our work. My takeaways for this project were:
Its very important to be a good listener and an articulate communicator when collaborating to solve design problems with someone else.
Great design is in the small details. This project afforded me the time to focus on those and showed me that they are always worth the extra effort.
I’ve applied these lessons to my other projects, and enjoyed higher quality work as a result.
Designed by Saulomon John 2025
Social
Get in touch at
Lato
Bank Gothic
Original Design
New Design
Original Design
New Design
Original Design
New Design
Original Design
New Design
I’ve worked solo for 99% of my UX design history. This project marked the first time I worked collaboratively with another designer. My role was to share the workload of brainstorming improvements and creating the designs. I also facilitated the meetings for us designers and our stakeholders. Displayed on the left is one of the many designs we improved upon.
New Design
Original Design
Font choice has a dramatic effect on the ‘feel’ of a site. Originally I chose roboto as it is safe and readable, but it isn’t expressive. To address this and maintain the readability, we chose Bank Gothic for the headers and Lato for the body text. In my mind these added a ‘techy’ feel to the designs. Furthermore, this enhanced the site compositionally. This is because fonts are the first the user sees upon going to the landing page.
The next issue addressed was the card styling. The old designs looked unappealing. Though they served their function, function without of visual appeal is unacceptable in most cases. Furthermore, the old cards did not look as clickable as they should have.
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