Provenance set out to build a company that reimagines the way people think about community, connection, and meaning, starting with how they celebrate major life milestones. With the initial entry wedge being weddings, they were looking to come out of stealth and launch their MVP to the market, and they also needed a marketing website to accompany it.
As a Product Designer, I built Provenance's MVP from scratch – I took the web app through all stages of the UX design process and got it ready for launch. I then designed and built a highly effective Webflow website that educates visitors about Provenance's offering and converts them into users and customers. Over the next two years, I worked on countless iterations of their existing offering, and also helped them launch a few new apps.
Provenance (Chim3ra, Inc.)
Los Angeles, CA, US
Both the initial launch and further iterations produced great results:
The first step was to get acquainted with the team’s vision and the plans they had for the product. Weddings are very complex by nature and for that reason getting alignment before starting any design work was crucial. To tackle this complexity, we decided to focus only on the ceremony
and not try to tackle all aspects of a wedding.
After we identified the key areas to focus on, I moved onto devising the app structure and what the user flows would look like for different user roles. Those different roles needed to have different levels of access to the tools and information regarding the wedding, meaning they would have a slightly different user flow so I ended up creating a lot of flow charts.
Once we had a structure in place, we moved onto wireframes where we explored how each screen would be laid out. This allowed us to quickly sketch out different user flows without having to spend too much time thinking about visual design of those screens.
The main focus during the initial stages was on onboarding and the Ceremony builder, the main tool in the Provenance wedding app, made to help you write your ceremony script. This laid the foundation for further expansion and paved the way for introduction of additional tools.
After we were happy with the wireframes, it was time to translate them into UI designs that would be handed over to the developers for implementation. This included defining the app’s visual identity that aligns with the brand guidelines, while also following UI best practices.
Brand guidelines were already there when I joined, but we significantly evolved them during the course of the project. In that process, a lot of inspiration was drawn from wedding scrapbooks. Elements like torn paper and photo collages influenced the app's overall aesthetic in a meaningful way.
The Ceremony Builder tool is made up of 6 modules, and the initial idea was to have the user write all 6 parts separately and put them together only when the user exports a PDF. Users found this confusing and a lot of them ended up abandoning the flow, which needed to be addressed.
I addressed it by creating a text editor screen where users can see the whole script at once, in a format very similar to other text editors they are already familiar with, along with a side-by-side view that allows users to have both the questions and the script open at once. This redesigned script editor served as a basis for other tools, like the Vow builder and Toast builder.
Once the MVP was in development, I shifted my focus towards creating a marketing website that would showcase Provenance's offering and convert visitors into users. This included defining the website structure, designing the home page and landing pages for their core tools and use cases, and planning out and designing a blog.
Same as with the app, the visual design of the website followed the brand guidelines which we evolved over time. The initial guidelines included a lot of x-ray images of flora and fauna but over time we replaced them with elements inspired by scrapbooks.
Once the design was ready, it was also my job to implement everything in Webflow, and it remained my job over the next two years. As Provenance was releasing new products and evolving existing ones, the website needed to expand and evolve as well.
Having a well-designed, properly implemented blog was crucial for the website's SEO. As we didn't have many articles, I designed the first version to be simple, but as we accumulated more content, I added more categories and sections where it made sense.
The work we did on the website helped shape the brand’s visual identity. The website designs influenced the app, and vice versa. The collages and torn paper transitions originated on the website and made it into the app, and the illustration you see above made it from the app to the website.
While the original tools worked without AI, their structure made AI the perfect way to make the process smoother for users and increase the value that the app provides. The biggest sticking point for most people was turning their answers into a first draft of their ceremony script, vows, or toast, and Gen AI was the perfect way to solve this issue for them.
Another big improvement AI brought was a much smoother experience for mobile users as it removed the need to type out the entire first draft on your own. After we implemented AI, users could simply answer questions and get the first draft in seconds. They could then just make edits to it before exporting – a much more manageable task when on mobile.
Once the Ceremony Builder was launched, it was quickly followed by two more wedding tools: Vow Builder and Toast Builder. In some ways, they were similar to the existing tool, but in others, they differed, so the challenge was keeping the experience consistent, as it’s quite likely that one user will use all three tools for their wedding. Alongside these two tools, I also designed
a flow for purchasing speechwriting services.
After the successful launch of the Provenance Weddings app, it was time to expand to other milestones. The next logical step was birth, so I was tasked with designing the Baby Letter Builder. We also decided to create tools that weren’t specific to one milestone, which required me to design a system of cross-app navigation and collaborate with the rest of the product team on a design system.
Once the main wedding tools had gone through a few iterations, the focus shifted to bringing in more users and converting them into customers. Since I worked on everything from the website to the paywall, I was in a unique position to help the team improve both by utilizing A/B testing. We ran a series of tests aiming to improve signups and purchases, and we managed to achieve a double-digit increases in both categories.
While I took care of technical SEO from the very start, for the last 9 months of the project, I began contributing in a more serious capacity and became the lead person in charge of SEO. In addition to technical SEO audits and website performance monitoring, I started conducting keyword research and suggesting content ideas, adding schema markup and improving internal linking, all of which resulted in a 15x increase in organic traffic.
