The nature of my site — a government–administered site to aid uptake of shared leave for new parents — gave me some food for thought on only day two, the question being whether this type of app/site needs a checkout page. Nevertheless, I have designed one with the purposes of the app in mind. The concept assumes that there is an option to pay for some administration or application fees through the app, which would ease any uptake process of the initiative. Also note that I have made a slight alteration to the logo –after more viewings of it, I felt like the initial iteration read more like “shard” than “shared” but I wanted to keep the core concept in the wordmark. I also didn't alter the image from Day 001 so that I can compare the iterations.

The checkout page concept takes into consideration that:

1. abandonment of payment pages is quite high on the internet, and while this service is something that is less likely to be navigated away from as easily as a shopping cart from a fashion retailer, it is still something that needs to be considered in the design.

2. users can be easily distracted while checking out. One instance is if there are other elements on the page which can draw attention away from the checking out process. A second instance is that if the checkout process takes too long, it may be abandoned. So the page should be kept as minimal (as little form fields as possible) and concise as possible.

3. keeping the user in touch about the stages of the process can aid completion. The stages bar under the header, and a summary box have been added for this reason.

4. skeuomorphic design can help users of design to more easily picture the whole process involved in taking up this service. For this reason, elements that have been incorporated into the concept include a roughly layout–accurate credit card (once the card payment option has been selected) with card digits grouped into fours, auto–capitalising of the information filled into the other fields (like on a card) and clarity of the format of dates.

5. The language used on the page is mildly conversational, keeping the tone light and friendly and emphasising the aspect of “helping you”.

The landing page on my app was always going to be rather similar to the design of the sign–up page from Day 001 of the challenge, so I figured I would try and incorporate a sense of stronger copywriting in it. 

Figuring that users arriving on the landing page will have a degree of prior knowledge as to what Shared Parental Leave may entail, this concept is a chance to reinforce the benefits for new parents in taking up the initiative. Having read books on copywriting before, I hope that my final choice in copy is faithful to the basic principles of copywriting (without having spent a lot of hours on multiple iterations). Focus on your target audience; emphasise benefits, not features; and keep the language as simple as possible to get the message across successfully. Finally, I attempted to focus on what may be a root cause motivation to anyone potentially considering the Shared Parental Leave initiative.

So, two things — I have found a new, fancier mockup so I will be using this one from now on. And also, I skipped Day 004, simply because the challenge was to design a calculator and at the moment, with the app still being quite thin on screens, I've yet to find a use for a calculator on this app. I will circle back to it once it becomes apparent that the app has a use for a calculator.

So the app icon will show the “ED” of the wordmark, which is the conceptual part of the whole logo. I won't divulge anymore — it's always said that a great idea does not need to be explained so this will be a bit of a watershed moment for this concept!