Cleantech Group
Redesigning a Research Firm's Site for Different Audiences
ROLE
Product Designer
Scope: Website Redesign
TEAM
Product Designer
PM
Web Developer
TIMELINE
3 Months - Strategy to designs ready for development.
Outcome
Launched a redesigned website, and delivered design system and assets for the client to update the site.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
Give five user groups a clear path and understanding to the right offer for them.
WHAT'S CLEANTECH GROUP?
A research and advisory firm covering the cleantech sector. Its clients are corporates, investors, governments and foundations, deciding who to partner with, where to invest and what to fund.
Problem
Nothing told a visitor the site was for them. No cues for different user types, six calls to action in one viewport, audience pages that all looked alike. And nothing could be changed without engineering, so filters returned no results and finished events still took registrations.
OUTCOME
Designed and launched a site organized around who it's for, with five audience paths inside one navigation. A year after launch, Cleantech's team continues to build new pages from the foundations we've delivered to them.
Architecture
THE TWO-SIDED PROBLEM
The site had to attract two distinct types of user groups while maintaining focus.
Innovators are the supply. Corporates, investors, governments and foundations are the demand looking for them. The old site treated both identically.
Site users include five audiences on the demand side, two on the supply side.
OPTION ONE
Split the site in half behind a toggle, the way a marketplace does.
Each side gets unambiguous messaging. The cost was real: an innovator who misses the toggle lands in a journey built for someone else, universal content gets duplicated, and there may not be enough innovator content to justify half a site.
Toggle in the navigation which updates the site content for the correct user type.
OPTION TWO
A busier navigation was the cheaper risk.
One nav with two labelled paths felt busier, but nothing gets duplicated and nobody gets stranded. We chose it due to concern with putting a whole audience behind a control they may miss.
Keeping one navigation meant the nav couldn’t sort people on its own.
Using who we help to funnel the correct users to their appropriate pages.
Page Structure
THE OLD SEQUENCE
The pages opened with the company and buried the offer under three case studies.
Headings named categories rather than the users directly. such as “Cleantech Group for Corporations”. The only closing action was a contact form.
Screenshots of the Cleantech Group site before the redesign.
THE QUESTION ORDER
What a visitor is trying to resolve turns out to be a sequence.
Is this for me? Do you understand my situation? What do I actually get? Why you, and what do I do now? I rebuilt the pages against that order, opening with a hero that names the audience and closing with an action built for them.
Proof moved behind the offer, because evidence only works once a reader knows what’s being evidenced. And service descriptions stopped being reused across six pages: what a service means to an investor isn’t what it means to a policymaker.
Five blocks mapping each pages structure, agreed with the client before anything was drawn.
Visual Direction
CREDIBILITY
The pages looked static, and that undercut the research they were selling.
The audit’s sharpest line wasn’t about structure: visual design signals professionalism and credibility, it doesn’t just make things pretty.
Screenshots of the previous Cleantech Group website before the redesign.
Visual Directions
Each direction was aimed at a different reading of the same audience.
All the proposed visual directions kept all the user groups in mind. We also wanted to ensure that the visual language could hold when their team continues to update their site, and marketing materials.
Two of the proposed visual directions.
Handover
COMPLEX CHARTS
Creating cohesiveness between marketing materials and site's visual language.
The client wanted to show the depth of their data through developer-built visualizations. That would have rebuilt the exact dependency the project existed to remove. Arguing is only half a position, so the other half was a self-serve charting route and a branded flowchart kit with prebuilt connectors, since anything needing the pen tool would have gone unused.
Assets created to help the Cleantech Group team create materials consistent with the site redesign branding.
The Result
A YEAR ON
Cleantech’s team is still building pages from the system without us.
Launched 10 October 2025. The site now carries event pages for the 2026 Europe forum and the 2027 North America forum. Neither existed at handover. That’s the outcome worth pointing at. Not that a site shipped, but that they’ve been running it on their own since.
