I got to be involved with so many new ventures, many failed to survive and could scale up. Among some that could, was Arge 24.
Link 24 is one of the web services digital agency Arge 24 offers to shorten long URLs.
When I was onboarded with the project, the website was already getting a lot of traffic from SEO, however the service did not have a business model yet.

PHASE 0: My Background

In 2021, I sent my resume to Arge 24 because I was hoping to pivot  my carreer towards UX design. I had no prior practical experience but tons of theoretical knowledge, and was hoing to utilize them into practice ASAP. I researched the ARGE well enough to impress them during the interview, but obviously I did not realize that they had no internal design body within the company, but budget and thirst for upscaling before joining the team.

It was the dream opportunity:
I was gonna first build the design department from zero. Then who knows… Sky was the limit.

I took a snapshot of a project company, with a sizeable amount of products that they had developed by their customer demands. These products were not published online though.

To prove my proficiency, I came up with a plan. I was going to start redesigning the products to drive customers and traffic online.

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PHASE I: Research

After interviewing the CEO, I knew where to start. I suggested investing the more of the company resources on product development to automize revenue, starting with Link 24.

I laid out the benchmark product frame by frame. I invited the project’s BD to the Figma file I created. I got prepared to the probable resistance of changing the ways around how things are done: Figma was not recognized or used in ARGE 24 before. After I redesigned the UI and wrote new copies and prepared a prototype.

The product I picked to start this with was not random:
Link 24 was a URL Shortener. Influencership was booming, Twitter did not shorten them links by default by then and there was no product as such in the Turkish market. Our digital marketing team was top noutch. I asked them rapport of benchmark and started building there. I was gonna prove, fingers crossed, change the design narrative from ‘just the creaties’, to you know strategy.

The service was easy to find it with a Google search, but a quick desktop research revealed that it did not communicate its features as well as its competitors. A brief qualitative research also revealed that the product’s generic appearence did not evoke trust.

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PHASE II: Design

While developing Link 24’s brand identity, I used a parallel language to Arge 24’s brand identity I was designing at that time.
To keep the color, typography and the graphic style similar to the parent design system of Arge 24 would not only save time and make things easier for the team, but also could keep consistency throughout the agency to start evoking trust.

After analising and desiging the product plan subscriptions, we made the advantages of using a professional plan more noticable, via a chrome extention we added to the product.

Considering what was revealed during the user research, I argued my way to target different audiences with varying copies and landing pages, instead of putting all the features and capabilites of the product on one single page. This strategy was unique to Link 24; none of its competitors follow this approach for its users.

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THE CONCLUSION

This project was a turning point in my career, since development of it earned me title of creative director within the first 3 months of my journey with Arge 24.