✦ ROOTLINE
Rebuilding a B2B site around the moment trust collapses.
Rootline didn't need a visual refresh. It needed to stop costing the company leads. Small business owners were landing on the site, getting confused about what was on offer, and quietly closing the tab. The redesign started from that, not from the brand.
role
UX / UI / Research / Wireframing / Testing
duration
2 Weeks
industry
B2B / IT Services
tools
Figma, Miro, FigJam
OVERVIEW
Rootline is an IT solutions provider working with small and medium business owners. The challenge wasn't a shortage of services. It was a shortage of clarity. Most visitors weren't technical. They needed reassurance, proof, and a clear path before they felt comfortable reaching out, and the existing site gave them none of those things.
The goal of the redesign was a responsive site that builds trust early, explains services in plain language, and makes contact feel like a low-risk next step instead of a commitment.
Trust drops before contact.
RÚBEN'S BRIEF
"I want this to be as clear as possible, as simple as possible, as concrete as possible. Guide business owners. Don't overwhelm them."
WHAT WAS MISSING
No testimonials. No pricing reference. No legal pages. No defined niche. Every conventional trust signal a hesitant buyer scans for, absent.
MARKET GAP
Competitors landed in one of two places: cold and technical, or safe and forgettable. Rootline could own the space between, reliable, local, approachable, but the website wasn't claiming it.
USER INTERVIEWS
Talking to actual small business owners, the pattern was consistent: confidence dropped the longer they stayed on the site. They couldn't articulate what Rootline did, who it was for, or why they should trust the company over a competitor.
The site didn't lack information. It lacked structure, and it lacked the signals that tell a non-technical buyer "you're in the right place."
This made the problem clear: the website didn’t lack information — it lacked structure and trust signals.
From insights to constraints.
Three problems showed up in every interview and every competitor comparison:
a value proposition that didn't land in the first ten seconds
contact buried behind too many clicks
no visible proof the company had done this before
The temptation was to add more, more copy, more reassurance, more pages. I went the other way. I defined a single decision flow, understand, validate, trust, contact, and asked one question of every screen: which of those four jobs is this doing? Anything that didn't answer got cut.
Less pages. More confidence.
The MVP was built around three calls I was willing to defend:
01. Lead with who it's for, not what it does
Users couldn't tell us what Rootline did within ten seconds of landing. I rewrote the hero to answer "who is this for" before "what do we do," because confused users don't keep reading to find out.
02. Process transparency over price transparency
Testing surfaced something I hadn't expected. Non-technical buyers weren't blocked by not knowing the cost. They were blocked by not knowing what would happen after they reached out. So I restructured the services page around a four-step journey instead of a price grid. Lower hesitation, more replies.
03. Make contact the easy option, not the brave one
On the original site, contact was a destination. I made it ambient instead, a sticky CTA in the nav, plus contextual prompts at every natural decision point. The user shouldn't have to go find the button. The button should be wherever the user is when they decide.
Too many buttons, not enough clarity.
Low-fidelity testing
showed users hesitating at exactly the screens that were supposed to move them forward. Three causes: too many competing CTAs per screen, wording that didn't tell the user what would happen if they clicked, and a hierarchy that gave equal weight to "Contact us" and "Learn more."
The fix wasn't more design. It was less. One primary action per screen. Labels rewritten to describe the outcome ("Tell us what you need") instead of the action ("Submit"). Secondary options demoted, not deleted. After iteration, users moved through the flow without the pause-and-reread behavior the first round had shown.
Clarity comes from hierarchy.
Mid-fidelity testing
showed the layout still felt heavy. Users were scanning but not absorbing, which on a trust-building site is the same as not reading.
The fix was structural, not decorative. Stronger section separation so each block had one job. Tighter visual hierarchy so the eye knew where to land first. Navigation labels shortened to nouns the user already had in their head, not internal product names.
These weren't dramatic changes. They were the kind of changes that disappear once they work.
Before → After
Before (original site):
No value proposition above the fold
Contact buried, no sticky nav CTA
No testimonials, no case studies, no social proof
No legal pages, which read as fraud risk to a cautious buyer
Animated emojis that undermined the professional tone
Three competing CTAs per page, users froze
No clear niche, the site read as "we serve everyone," which means no one
After:
Sticky "Contact Us" CTA in nav, visible at every scroll position
Hero rewritten around the user's goal, not the company's offering
Testimonials placed at the credibility decision point, right after services
Legal pages added; privacy policy visible in the footer
Custom illustrations replaced the emojis, approachable without being childish
One primary CTA per viewport, tested, trust improved
Niche stated explicitly: "for small businesses" in the H1, above the fold
Warmth without losing credibility.
Most IT competitors picked one of two postures: cold and technical, or safe and generic. The goal was to land between them.
Palette: Satin Deep Black (#142124) as the primary, soft Gin (#D6DDCD) as the supporting tone, Lima green (#B4FF69) as the single accent. Authority without aggression. Energy without noise. PP Mori for type, modern and precise without reading cold.
The illustration call. The original hero used a stock photo of a server rack. I replaced it with a custom illustration of a person at a laptop. Small change, real consequence. The hero stopped being about Rootline's infrastructure and started being about the user's outcome. In hi-fi testing, three of five participants described the site as "friendly." That word never appeared in feedback on the original.
Outcomes & Reflection
Trust built through structure, not decoration.
By hi-fi testing, users moved from hero to contact without a stall. The three questions they arrived with, what do they do, who have they worked with, how do I reach them, got answered in sequence, on the same page, without a phone call.
The final hi-fi shipped responsive across desktop, tablet, and mobile. Rootline went from a site that introduced doubt to a site that built confidence as the user scrolled.
What I'd do differently: run a desirability test earlier, before committing to hi-fi. Validating the brand direction with two or three small business owners up front would have saved a round of visual revision later.
What this project taught me: trust is a structural problem before it's a visual one. The user journey map, the one that showed the exact moment confidence collapsed, ended up being the real brief for every screen that followed.
