Kaka Ride

Before

After

The approach

Before getting carried away with colours, animations and pretty screens, I needed to understand what wasn't working.

Through stakeholder sessions, user research and a competitive review of the ride-hailing space, I got a better picture of what Kaka Ride wanted to achieve and what users expected.

A look at the existing website made a few things obvious:

• The brand was all about fun and energy, but the website felt rather lifeless.

• Important actions like booking a ride and downloading the app were easy to miss.

• The visuals lacked the energy and personality you'd expect from a ride-hailing brand.

Finding the right direction

The idea wasn't to throw everything out and start making things flashy. It was to find that sweet spot between simplicity and personality.

I settled on a clean, modern direction with playful visuals and subtle motion. Enough energy to make the experience memorable, but not so much that it got in the way.

The direction was shared with stakeholders early, so we could agree on the vision before getting too far into the design.

Good design needs good words, too.

A beautiful website won't do much if visitors can't figure out what the business offers or what to do next.

That's why content and design went hand in hand. Working with the copywriter, we shaped the information architecture, headlines and messaging alongside the layouts.

The result? Content that felt more natural, communicated the brand's value clearly and helped visitors find their way to the right actions.

The design

With the direction in place, it was time to give Kaka Ride the website it deserved.

The visual direction leaned into clean layouts, bold imagery and playful details. I put together moodboards to bring the ideas together and worked with a photographer to plan images that captured the lifestyle behind the brand.

Me on set, playing creative director for the day

The hero section needed to stand out

The original idea was a day-to-night hero animation (see below). I was pretty excited about it until I ran it by the WordPress developer. Turns out, bringing that idea to life was going to be a lot harder than I imagined. Not exactly what I wanted to hear.

Back to reality, I guess.

That's when the 3D car idea came in. Instead of switching scenes, we had a car circling the Kaka Ride logo. I teamed up with a 3D motion designer to bring it to life, and honestly, it was a pretty good plot twist. The result gave the homepage an instant sense of movement and made for a much more memorable first impression.

Everything came together in a cohesive set of responsive website designs, with the right balance of content, visuals and breathing room.

The results

Following the redesign, ease-of-use ratings jumped from 2.3 to 4.7 out of 5. That's a 100% improvement! The accessibility score also increased by 15%, and the client gave the finished work a 9/10.

Beyond the numbers, Kaka Ride now had a website that better reflected its personality, communicated its services and made it easier for visitors to take action.

Lessons

• Great websites are team efforts. Working with the copywriter, photographer and 3D motion designer showed just how much better things get when different creative minds come together.

• A good idea needs a way to ship. The original hero animation didn't make it past the development reality check, but that pushed us towards an even better alternative. A reminder to bring developers into the conversation early.