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The Project:

Website design and delivery effort with an objective to design and deliver a new B2C digital web presence for them that would improve brand awareness, provide relevant content to perspective customers,  and provide the ability to securely apply online for boat and RV finance loans.

The Client:

Newcoast Financial Services is a financial institution that provides consumer based boat and RV loans.

My Role: 

As Project Manager and UX/UI Designer my role included the following responsibilities during this project’s life cycle..

• Conducted initial brand and service knowledge transfer sessions
• Scheduled and lead website project objective meetings
  • Defined site navigation & forms
  • Detailed the online application process including content
  • Discussed site securitization (forms and applicable CRM integration)
• Produced Statement of Work (SOW) providing necessary edits
• Created site style guide (including colors, fonts and image sizing)
• Produced & presented low-fidelity Balsamiq wireframes (3 iterations)
• Designed & presented high-fidelity Photoshop mockups (3 iterations)
• Communicated and present all designs for stakeholder approvals
• Provided UAT for staging phase and post final launch
• Produced full site build outs in staging and production environments

The Evolution:

Like most website projects this effort started out by me facilitating several meetings with the Newcoast Financial Services team to establish an understanding regarding their business services and their client target market. Next, we defined business objectives for the new site build and established a timeline of deliverables. Once that knowledge transfer process was complete I composed an SOW and received stakeholder approval.  

In addition to the design ideation there were two major components of this website project that needed to be implemented into the design.  First, the site would contain robust online finance applications containing private customer information and second, the data would need to integrate securely with their CRM system.   

The Delivery

I successfully completed the approved site design within the defined timeline and worked simultaneously with a developer to design, test and implement the CRM integration for the online applications.  We accomplished the security objective by applying HTTPS technology.  This solution provided the necessary security protection and data integrity that we were looking for. 

Collaboration:

CRM Integration:  Partnered with an internal Sr Developer on development and integration of the online finance applications with the CRM system.

Front-End:  Worked with agency partner for front end development support on navigation and styling changes. 

SEO:  Consulted with in-house SEO specialist regarding necessary content changes and URL structure to ensure optimal site ranking.

Deployment:  Coordinated and managed all deployments (staging & production environments)  with in-house Sitecore Developer.

Design Tools:

Balsamiq, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop