Whitepages Premium

A paid consumer service offering powerful lookup tools to search public databases.

Problem

We were tasked with creating a new paid lookup app for public records. We needed to create the tool itself as well as all the surrounding marketing.

Outcome

  • Worked with small team of engineers, another designer, and product leaders to iterate on the product concept in its early stages.

  • Worked with fellow Mindy Nies to produce early stage designs for the app.

My Role

Interaction Designer, involved in the project during the initial phases of design. I worked with:

  • Fellow designer, Mindy Nies

  • 3 engineers

  • 1 product manager

Problem

A new kind of experience

Whitepages had been a free, ad-supported business since its inception in 1997. We had to address a range of design challenges that were new to the company:

  • Creating a conversion funnel for paid users; account creation had been a low priority on the free site. We experimented with previewing Premium information as a hook on our free site.

  • Market and display a much wider range of information than before. Free Whitepages was limited to names, addresses, and phone numbers, but Premium would have access to a much wider range of publicly available information.

  • Build infrastructure that was new to our product offerings surrounding payment management and other account controls.

Iterations

Working closely with product and engineering, we rapidly produced a wide array of concepts.

  • Crafted a sub-brand for Premium that leveraged the clean ad-free space.

  • Created search flows, details pages, account management views, and marketing pages.

  • Built out a custom illustration style, which went on to influence illustrations on our Pro marketing site.

  • Built out email templates.

  • Constantly reacted to the influx of new data types and sources as the business evolved alongside the design process.

Outcome

Early stage designs

This is the state of the design before I shifted to working on our Pro product, with continuing work conducted by Mindy Nies and others.

  • We successfully integrated a wide array of data in a digestible fashion.

  • Close collaboration with dev resulted in rapid turnaround and easily implemented designs.

  • Business goals were met, and Premium designs informed the look and feel of future changes to the free site.

Home page

Account dashboard

Person details

Results and learnings

Towards the end of the early design process I was shifted to the Pro product to address acute needs there. Premium design work continued under my collaborator, Mindy Nies. You can see that work here!

  • The Premium site went on to be an important part of the Whitepages ecosystem. It’s since been fully merged into the the overall Whitepages.com site, so while the site itself no longer exists its functionality lives on.

  • Previous third party ads were able to be replaced with our in-house product leading to a cleaner and more cohesive product.

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