How a long-term partnership keeps elevating an AI hiring tool
The Project
What began as an “express” rebranding for Arena Analytics became a 2-year long partnership, during which our team created elevated, cohesive branding to implement throughout the company. The outcome? A new website and aesthetic to implement across Arena’s branded materials, from product demos to marketing materials. The cherry on top? A deep understanding of our client’s business, mission, and values that helped us create the most brand-aligned designs possible.
The Challenge
How can we revamp Arena’s traditional look to match their revolutionary offering, applying it across the brand & products?
Arena’s SaaS offering is as cutting-edge as they come: Predictions generated by artificial intelligence that tell companies whether a candidate for a job will be retained if hired. Not only that—Arena’s algorithm also includes powerful bias mitigation technology. This means that companies that hire based on Arena’s predictions remove any sort of unconscious prejudice or bias from the hiring process, making for a more equitable job market. When they partened with us, Arena had a classic, traditional look that needed a refesh that truly reflected the way they’re transforming the labor market using AI.
From the start, we were excited to take on a project whose value’s aligned so closely with Indi’s. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t come without its challenges. Over our more than 2-year partnership, we identified 4 main challenges to elevating Arena’s digital brand:
The solution
Our project with Arena grew and evolved over our time working together, but throughout we worked on product, marketing, and website projects. Here’s an overview of the innovative solutions we worked on for each one.
Product
1. Brand Narrative Workshop
First things first: Defining Arena’s new identity. Using our custom Brand Narrative Workshop, we were able to nail down the story that Arena wanted to tell the world. We created a Brand Messaging Guide based on this workshop that included voice and tone guidelines, language to resonate with Arena’s different audiences, and Voice of Customer research.
2. Visual Branding
In our branding workshop we defined Arena as the trailblazer of hiring tools, transforming the labor marketing by cutting uncertainty and bias out of the hiring process. This was reflected in Arena’s new Style Tile, which included an exciting new color palette and human-centered imagery that reflected Arena’s values. This formed the basis for a UI Library that kept on growing as we went along.
3. UX/UI Product Design
After some research, benchmarking, and closely studying the product briefs for Arena’s client- and candidate- facing products, we built wireframes for each alongside our partners at Aerolab.
The priority for the candidate-facing product was creating a short, simple user journey, while the goal of the client-facing product was to make it quick and easy to search and filter candidates. Once wireframes were completed and confirmed with the team, we applied the sleek new UI that was created in the visual branding phase.
4. Sales Demo Design
One of Arena’s perks is that clients don’t necessarily have to familiarize themselves with a new tool–There was also a way to incorporate Arena predictions in clients’ existing Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). The Arena Sales team was eager to show this option to potential clients, but wasn’t able to show real client ATSs for privacy reasons. So, we made them something even better.
Our Sales Demos showed the true “Arena experience” for both clients and candidates in the form of an interactive Figma prototype. Finally, we helped Sales team get Figma-savvy so that they could use these demos in meetings to WOW potential clients.
Website
1. Strategy & Structure Discovery
We were SO pumped when after over a year working together, the Arena team took the plunge and asked us to fully redesign their website. And we didn’t take the request lightly—We had worked hard to deeply understand Arena’s offering and we wanted to make sure we could help their audience do the same.
As a starting point for our website design, we took a deep dive into Arena’s strategy for the site–Where their business and user goals overlap. We then created user navigation paths based on the user goals we defined with the Arena team, simulating how users with different goals would move through the site. This process led us to a Sitemap that wasn’t simply created off the top of our heads, but rather built from a foundation of user goals and business strategy.
2. Web Design & Development
Once we had the Sitemap defined, we got designing and developing the first round of pages that the Arena team marked as priorities for release on the web. This would help us get the new site online ASAP as we kept on working on lower-priority pages. As the Arena team provided us content and input on the layout for each page, we built wireframes for each one and applied the new style when approved.
Another essential part of this phase of the project was to create graphics and illustrations that would accurately, but simply reflect Arena’s complex technology. To accomplish this, we created graphics featuring simplified versions of product UI and animated illustrations that represented the technology in a more abstract fashion. As the icing on the cake, we designed a custom icon system that the team can use now and in the future to represent their offerings.
Our dev team made sure that Arena was set up for independence by building the pages that would be most often updated (blog, events) on a CMS and teaching them how to use it. We also built them modules that would allow them to set up and launch their own landing pages whenever necessary.
Marketing
1. Marketing Materials & Assets Design
A constant throughout much of our partnership with Arena was our work with the Marketing team. This included work on a lot of classic marketing assets—Signage, ads, slide decks, step and repeats, one-pagers, and brochures—but also creating templates that would allow the team to be more autonomous going forward. Now a standardized slide, newsletter, letter, envelope, case study, and one-pager is used across the company to ensure brand consistency.
The results
The outcomes of this long-term partnership are too many to count. But to name just a few:
1- A new, sophisticated brand identity implemented across Arena’s company and teams
2- Product UX/UI that’s both elegant and usable for all audiences, along with demos to show it off
3- A website with all the bells and whistles, including motion UI on custom graphics to help the audience fully understand what Arena is and why it’s the most high-tech tool out there
Our work with Arena is a great testament to the fact that taking the time to connect, deeply understand your client’s offering, and build together pays off.
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