LoanMart® is the West Coast Industry Leader for auto title loans.  It launched in 2001 in the heart of the San Fernando Valley and worked hard to develop its portfolio of over 250,000 happy and satisfied customers.  In 2015, LoanMart decided it was time to redesign their website in an effort to help improve functionality, SEO standing, and conversion.  In addition to these core tasks, I was required to bring the 1990s era site onto a CMS platform with both dual language capability and responsive behavior.

The first phase of any project is research, and this redesign offered a lot of unique problems to think through.  The most notable areas were figuring out technical requirements, project management, content exploration & restructuring, and marketing design.

Often times I've found it difficult to get technical and marketing teams speaking the same language.  As part of the LoanMart team, I was able to help bridge this gap.   This involved researching what technologies IT had proposed and then selling the solutions that would work best for marketing (ie. ease of use, and important details such as canonical URLs and SEO functionality, etc.)  In the end we were able to quickly agree on a Bootstrap scaffold with a DNN (DotNetNuke) CMS platform underneath.

Successful design cannot happen in a vacuum.  It requires understanding your content, what you are trying to sell, and what matters most to your customers.  For me, this process begins by exploring the competitors.  It's important to see what's expected in the market place (ie. marketing mechanisms and verbiage.)  Next comes a deep dive into the existing content and structure of the site in order to see how we a) measure up to the competitors and b) how we can beat them!  The existing LoanMart website had fairly decent bones to it, so it was mainly a matter of restructuring the sections into a more linear purchasing path.  Working closely with the Web Analytics Manager I was able to accomplish this as well as our SEO project requirements.  

I was chosen to join the the website redesign project, rather than another UX / UI designer, for my specialty in Marketing Design.  Most designers can make a functional, beautiful site - but having a designer with the knowledge of marketing takes your site from eye candy to a functional means of profit.  The clearest example of this is seen in the hero section of the home page.  Most UX / UI designers will design a hero section consisting of a headline and full screen background image.  This tactic is wonderful for conveying branding - but does little to push the conversion needle.  I chose to blend that aesthetic with a clean registration form.  While reducing the need for a secondary click, the customer no longer has a question as to what the next step is.  This simple, but informed, choice dramatically increased sales for LoanMart.

UX / UI testing is always an important step of my process - especially on a site as large as this.  Unfortunately, the budget for this project (both in time and finances) did not allow for external testing.  As an alternative, I utilized what internal resources I could by inviting various members of the LoanMart team to explore the new redesign.  I watched them use the different sections of the site, noting down complications and difficulties.  Through this experimentation I worked to revise the navigation bar (by creating faux breakpoints to maintain legibility, ease of use, and marketing mechanisms) as well as polish a few choke points in the Application Pages (by adding tool tips, modals, and new dynamic behavior to streamline the purchase path.)