Jacob Schneider
Overview
Pacific Vista Landscape Services needed a modern, professional website to better represent their 30+ years of experience and attract higher-value commercial clients. The existing site lacked structure, visual hierarchy, and clear calls to action. This redesign focused on improving usability, trust, and conversion.
Roles and Responsiblities
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Oppurtunitity Walkthrough
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Site Map
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Competetive Analysis
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Prototype
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Mid Fidelity Presentation
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Wix Site Developer
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Final Site Presentation
Our Goal
What I aimed to achieve:
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Increase client trust and perceived professionalism
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Clearly communicate services and expertise
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Improve navigation and user flow
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Increase contact form submissions
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Create scalable design system for future growth
Problem
What wasn’t working:
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Outdated design that didn’t reflect quality of work
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Confusing navigation and unclear services
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Weak brand identity
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No clear call-to-action for leads
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Poor mobile experience
Stakeholder Interview
I conducted stakeholder interviews to understand both business goals and user needs.
What I Learned:
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The top priority was to build trust and professionalism, not flashy design
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The site needed to feel clean, modern, and easy to navigate
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Mobile usability was essential, reinforcing a mobile-first approach
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The primary conversion flow was simple but unclear:
User contacts company → company creates a bid -
Target users often compare competitors before reaching out
Primary audience:
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Property managers
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HOAs
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Healthcare and senior living facilities
Key services:
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Commercial landscape maintenance
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Tree trimming
Major point of confusion,
Users mistakenly thought services were residential
Competitive Analysis:
Stay Green
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Strong, professional visuals with polished imagery and clear branding
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Builds trust through real project photos, videos, and detailed service explanations
Transparent contact and bid process with clear calls to action -
Highlights credibility with awards, certifications, and associations
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Emphasizes company culture and recruitment to humanize the brand
SCV Landscaping
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Website feels outdated with weaker visual quality and inconsistent layout
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Limited content depth, especially in services and project examples
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Minimal trust signals (few reviews, awards, or credentials highlighted)
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Basic contact functionality without strong user guidance
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Overall lower perceived quality compared to competitors
Kathy’s Landscaping
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Professional but slightly cluttered visual design, with inconsistent hierarchy
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Strong service breakdown across multiple pages, but navigation feels fragmented
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Heavy use of stock images reduces authenticity
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Contact process is accessible but spread across multiple touchpoints
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Includes reviews, but lacks strong storytelling or differentiation
Enhanced Landscape
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Clean, professional design with strong use of color and layout consistency
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High-quality, authentic visuals including drone photography and real projects
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Clear service explanations with a logical flow
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Showcases company scale, team, and capabilities effectively
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Includes some reviews and credibility markers, but could expand further
Overall
Takeaways
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Authentic visuals and real project content are key to building trust and perceived quality
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Clear service breakdowns and streamlined contact flows improve usability and conversions
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Credibility signals (reviews, awards, associations) differentiate strong competitors from weaker ones
Original
Website Walkthrough
Homepage
About Us & Leadership
Careers
Services
Blog & Articles
Cluttered layout, weak hierarchy, and missing trust signals reduce first impression and professionalism.
Lacks depth, credibility, and functional leadership content, weakening trust and brand story.
Vague content, generic visuals, and poor structure make the page unclear and unengaging.
Inconsistent design, errors, and cluttered UX reduce credibility and usability.
Inconsistent design, errors, and cluttered UX reduce credibility and usability.
Key issues:
Inconsistent design, glitches, and usability issues weaken overall user experience and trust.
Prototyping
Homepage Sketch
The goal was a clear call to action to request a quote, easy-to-find testimonials for added legitimacy, a reference to 30 years of service, and a visually impactful hero image. During the stakeholder presentation, they wanted the text to mention that it is commercial landscaping, as clients often assume it is residential.
About Us Sketch
The goal was a clear call to action to request a quote, easy-to-find testimonials for added legitimacy, a reference to 30 years of service, and a visually impactful hero image. During the stakeholder presentation, they wanted the text to mention that it is commercial landscaping, as clients often assume it is residential.
Low Fidelity Prototype
A clickable prototype built using Figma. It has no color and repeated examples as placeholders. This prototype was used in usability testing.
The 5-person icons show the seats available, the counselor's rating, and specialties. Clicking the arrow brings them to the reserve page, and the top right icon goes to the filters page.
The Filters page shows several ways to narrow down a search for a user's counselor, to book the best session possible.
The reserve page is a way of counselors further explaining their unique experience and qualification and to welcome in the new user.
Usability Testing
5
Prototype
Tests
16-23
Ages
13
Clickable
Screens
The Objective
Discover if the participant successfully booked a session with a therapist.
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Questions to be answered:
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Is it clear on the home page how to navigate to booking?
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Is the user able to search for a counselor by specialty?
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Log in
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Book session
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Filter to search by specialty
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Apply filter
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Select a counselor
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Reserve time
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Review and select session
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Confirm session
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Return to homepage
The Task
The Feedback
We learned that our overall flow was functional, however, several buttons needed to be clearly defined, and we needed more calendar scheduling filters. In addition, considering that this is a mental health app, we learned that our phrasing needed to be more empathetic and sensitive. For example, we changed our congratulations page from "Do a happy dance" to "Now take some time for yourself."
High Fidelity Mockup
Personally mockuped an idea for high-fidelity design. My changes included adding color and photos. The colors are meant to give a calming sunset aura. The glass-like interface is representative of the strength and vulnerability of its users.
My Personal Takeaways and Possible Future Steps
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This is my favorite project because our group decided to take on a problem that's very meaningful to me: destigmatizing and increasing access to mental health. With that as a starting point, we narrowed our focus to specifically teenagers without a strong support system as one of the most vulnerable age groups. As I conducted interviews and compiled responses, I began truly empathizing with this demographic and learned that they want to talk to others about their problems with friends and professionals but feel shame and lack the resources to do so. I believe we can solve this problem by creating an app that allows users to freely access counselors and build connections with other individuals facing the same problems.
Given the opportunity to do this project again, with more time and resources, I would love to gather more data and talk to more potential users. Selecting teenagers as our targeted users proved very difficult to recruit, and we had to expand our age range a bit.
I hope to spend more time on this project beyond this deadline. We have discussed partnering with graduate students studying therapy to recruit as our counselors. We also would like to add a journal feature, the counselors portal, and incorporate a bigger social connection aspect to our app. Many other ideas have been generated between our group, and we see this only as a starting point of a very fruitful journey.
