U-Haul International main site.

Identity

U-Haul, which was born in the post-WWII boom, has an brand strongly tied to the American dream of making a new start in a new place.

I communicated this with splash pictures on the major product pages that featured American landscapes as much as the product. The intent is to emphasize the positive aspects of moving (and U-Haul's place in it) – adventure and new possibilities.

This thought is mated to a layout defined by distinct blocks and a vivid palette keying off of U-Haul's orange, creating a style that feels uncluttered and inviting while building on the company's existing 60-year history.

Navigation

The splash also serves as the focal point on a product page, containing the product's main selling points as well as links to acquire the product, either online or via a map of nearby U-Haul locations.

The consistent use of such elements carries across to the whole site. Where a product line needs differentiation, a "cheat sheet" is placed in the sidebar with pictures, a feature separating each product and links to an expanded guide. Related links are given a clear description and grouped in a gray box that usually goes in the sidebar. A bright green container signals a form where user action is required.

Text content

I rewrote the content in a relaxed but direct style more appropriate for the Web audience than U-Haul's usual voice.

Since Web users prefer scrolling down a page over clicking on links and waiting for another page to load to read more, I reduced the number of pages on the site to one-third by condensing self-congratulatory product pages into a few critical points that carry the desired message, and using more vertical real estate to fit the content of a category into a single page. This leads to customers finding what they're looking for with less clicks.

An example: One page had used 275 words to explain the mind-numbing engineering details of U-Haul's hitch ball. I distilled that into a 54-word paragraph on the main hitch product page, keeping the message, "Trust us for your hitch – we even have safety patents on the lowly hitch ball."

While redundancy was kept to a minimum, different terms for the same destination were used to cover how people scan for keywords rather than digest the meaning of the text. For example, links on the front page labeled "Rates and reservations" and "Rent equipment" both go to the same page.

Interface process

To anchor every page on the site, an orange stripe was chosen to recall the familiar stripe on all U-Haul trucks and trailers.

Icons were used at first for visual spice, but the first round of testing showed decisively that users were confused; text links were clicked on three times more than icons.

It's crucial that users don't feel lost in the site. In spite of the common use of a corporate logo as a link to the home page, it couldn't be relied on – users clicked their way back home over three times as much when a 'Home' text link was added.

The contact and search links were replaced with links to the two most popular destinations on the U-Haul site for two reasons: improvements in site navigation made it easier for users to find what they needed without going to expensive email support or an unpredictable search function; and the new links, both to major revenue producers, saw a 9% increase in traffic.

SuperGraphics

To support U-Haul's SuperGraphics campaign — a series of truck graphics celebrating unique features of each state — I conceptualized and executed a number of fun and educational sites exploring each subject further, and was art director for the rest. I also edited all the copy.