Crafting a high-impact brand identity and website for a powerful notetaking app

Client: Stashpad
Project duration: January – April 2023
Services: Brand positioning, verbal identity, messaging, content strategy, content design, interactive writing, copywriting

Context

Stashpad creates software to help developers and other technically-minded workers do their work more efficiently. For instance, its first product, a lightweight notes app, balances the simplicity of Apple Notes with the power of a heavier-duty notes app like Evernote, with keyboard shortcuts and in-line code editing to help make note-taking as speedy as possible for devs.

A seed-stage brand, Stashpad was preparing for its next fundraising push and reached out to Focus Lab for some brand assistance. We landed on a rebrand project that would give them new verbal and visual identity elements to use, along with a website redesign with new copy fit for the new brand.

My role

I served as brand and interactive writer on this project, owning the entirety of the verbal scope of work as well as some strategy at the beginning of the project.

Verbal identity work

Here are some of the things I did to support Stashpad’s verbal identity:

• Created a differentiator analysis to audit Stashpad’s competitors and differentiators in order to find lanes of messaging that are truly unique and ownable.

• Wrote a value proposition for the notes app, helping Stashpad’s founders create a foundation for their external messaging.

• Wrote an elevator pitch building off the value prop to further help inform messaging.

• Created an audience messaging framework, which provided Stashpad with messaging themes, recommendations, and tactics for each of their audiences.

• Provided guidance around a branded term, “stash,” such as when to use it in the product and how frequently to refer to it in messaging.

Interactive work

And here are some of the things I did once we got to redesigning the website:

• Designed content briefs for the client to complete, helping inform the inputs we needed for each redesigned page, including page goals, content suggestions, and desired interactions.

• Created lo-fi wireframes in Figma to provide our recommended goals, content, and interactions for each page.

• Collaborated with our project’s interactive designer to determine page layout, copy length, interactions, etc.

• Provided multiple rounds of copy, iterating based on feedback and changes in layout based on design.

What I learned

A little content hierarchy goes a long way in creating simple yet powerful product messaging.

Now, Stashpad’s value proposition doesn’t lie in its plethora of features; in fact, it stands in stark opposition to competitors like Notion and Evernote who can feel very heavy and create overwhelming user experiences for people are trying to get their work done quick. However, there is a lot going on with Stashpad and what it’s doing to make notetaking a better experience. How could we resolve this conflict and find a way to explain all the great ways Stashpad works while avoiding the lengthy feature lists of its competitors?

At some point in the project, we collected just about every feature we’d noticed, heard, or talked about, from the philosophy driving the app to the nitty-gritty of how its markdown feature works. There were a lot — nearly 20 features! Adding to the complexity, these features spanned various parts of the user flow and at varying levels of granularity.

A sampling of some of the features we’d captured.

I already knew that I wanted to lead with Stashpad’s high-level user journey, which we’d found three steps to describe: capture (write down your note), organize (put it in a folder or tag it), and return (come back to it later). For each step, I identified the features that had to be included to understand how the product works. The rest of the features we’d identified — more than a dozen — I went through individually, discovering that we could group features more or less into four categories that described high-level benefits: easy capture and organization, workflows that keep you fast and on track, accessibility from anywhere, and a catch-all “everything else you expect” that includes the more table-stakes (but still important!) features of the product.

We took a large product feature list and distilled it down into four groups of features arranged by user benefit.

Applying this information architecture to the content allowed us to touch on all the most important features, but in a way that was user-centered and decidedly not overwhelming — in a way, kind of like Stashpad itself.