How & How's identity for UserZoom adds warmth and wisdom to the UX firm's owl

It follows much expansion for UserZoom after it acquired Validately last summer, a UX software platform already well-established with designers and small businesses. With a larger audience and a wider range of products and services, it was time to take another look at its brand. Some thorough research by the Lisbon-based design agency found that the existing identity and owl mascot (affectionately known as 'Zooie') were not meeting the expectations of its customers. "They were in fact negatively impacting its position in the market," says Creative Director Cat How.

How & How gave 'Zooie' a facelift and updated the design language to be "warm yet wise", leveraging the "gentle softness" of the Recoleta typeface to provide something familiar yet fresh. The brand was expanded into a fully illustrated and animated icon package. As well as strategy, a new mascot and brand identity, How & How also carried out a complete website redesign, along with a Headless CMS front-end build.

To reposition UserZoom's digital products, How & How came up with the idea of a software package called UserZoom GO – all for its new design-savvy, rapid iterating audience, and maintained UserZoom as the flagship enterprise solution. "We worked alongside the UserZoom product team to bring the software dashboards and experience in line with the new brand design language," Cat adds. The new brand was also applied to UserZoom's Zendesk, Influitive and Skilljar for a more "cohesive brand experience" across their digital platforms.

The UserZoom marketing website redesign was an extensive overhaul of an existing 600-page WordPress site. How & How redesigned everything from the information architecture and content maps, to user journeys, wireframes and detailed page designs. "Amazingly, the entire process was led by user research and insights conducted using the UserZoom software itself," says Cat.