( Independent Practice / January 2016 – December 2019 (company period; project date not identified in the source files) )
Transcription
Delivered a complete responsive marketing and service website for a multi-service language business as a solo freelance engagement
- My role
- Freelance UI/UX Designer
- Timeline
- January 2016 – December 2019 (company period; project date not identified in the source files)
- Category
- Language Services / Transcription and Translation / Marketing Website
- Status
- New design, delivered
Tools Sketch
Generated schematic, not a screenshot. Real imagery to follow.
( The account )
Context
A transcription and translation service selling across five related offers: transcription, translation, writing, localisation, and subtitling. Its customers are unusually varied, spanning business, research, call centres, medical, legal-adjacent work, and education, and they arrive with very different volumes, accuracy requirements, and budgets.
Language services are sold on two things that are hard to show: accuracy and price. Accuracy is invisible until you receive the work, and price depends on audio length, turnaround, and verbatim style, so a single headline figure is either misleading or meaningless.
The problem
The category's central marketing problem is that **buyers cannot verify quality before purchase and cannot easily work out what they will pay**. Both unknowns stall the decision. A visitor who cannot estimate cost will not enquire, and a visitor who cannot assess accuracy will default to whichever provider looks cheapest, which is a race the service does not want to run.
There is a second structural problem. Five service lines and at least six distinct customer types produce a combinatorial mess: writing a page for each audience is unmanageable, and writing one generic page speaks to nobody. The visitor has to find themselves quickly.
A third issue is trust in an era of automation. Buyers increasingly wonder whether they are paying a human premium for machine output, and the site had to address that head-on rather than ignore it.
What I did
The site turns both unknowns into interactive answers rather than claims.
For price, it provides a **transcription cost calculator**, letting a visitor generate their own per-audio-minute figure instead of requesting a quote and waiting. For quality, it offers **sample transcripts**, so the visitor can inspect real output and learn the vocabulary of the category, full verbatim, clean verbatim, timestamps, at the same time. Together these convert the two blocking unknowns into self-service tools, which suits a buyer who wants to evaluate privately before speaking to anyone.
Accuracy, being unprovable in the abstract, is made **procedural**: a four-step process, transcription, review, proofreading, and quality check, presented as a numbered sequence. Rather than claiming accuracy, the page shows the machinery that produces it, which is a far more credible argument.
Audience breadth is handled by a **"Great For" grid** naming each customer type explicitly, business, research, call centres, medical, translation, education, so visitors self-identify in seconds without the page needing a variant per segment. The five service lines sit in a horizontal card carousel with one card highlighted, so breadth is visible without the page fragmenting.
The automation question is met directly with a "machines versus humans" comparison, turning a potential objection into a demonstration of why the human service is worth paying for.
Outcomes
- Delivered a complete responsive marketing and service website for a multi-service language business as a solo freelance engagement
- Converted the category's two blocking unknowns, price and quality, into self-service tools: a per-audio-minute cost calculator and inspectable sample transcripts
- Reframed accuracy as a visible four-step production process rather than an unverifiable percentage claim
- Enabled six distinct customer segments to self-identify on a single maintainable page rather than through per-segment variants
- Addressed the automation objection directly with a machines-versus-humans comparison
What I learned
Turning an unknown into a tool beats explaining it. Both blockers on this page, what will it cost and will it be any good, could have been addressed with reassuring copy, and copy would have changed almost nothing. A calculator and a sample viewer let the visitor answer their own question privately, and self-generated answers are trusted in a way that vendor claims are not. I now look for the blocking unknown on any service page and ask whether it can be made interactive.
Showing the process is a stronger proof than stating the outcome. Claiming high accuracy is free, so it reads as noise. Naming four production steps costs the business something real and is checkable, which makes it credible. Where a quality claim cannot be verified, describing the machinery behind it is usually the more persuasive route.
Naming your audiences out loud is underrated. It felt almost too plain to simply list the customer types, but a page cannot make six different segments each feel addressed through tone alone. Explicit naming did in one grid what an entire restructure into separate pages would have done, at a fraction of the maintenance cost.
( Tags )
- Language Services
- Transcription
- Translation
- Localisation
- Subtitling
- Marketing Website
- Landing Page
- Conversion Design
- Self-Service Tools
- Pricing Calculator
- Trust and Credibility Design
- Multi-Segment Audience Design
- Art Direction
- Responsive Web Design
- Freelance
- Solo Engagement
- Sketch