Southeast Mortgage
Mortgage industy leaders looking for an industry leading site to match.
Southeast Mortgage is a leading mortgage provider in Georgia and the surrounding states. Their problem was that their online presence felt outdated and not representative of their fresh, vibrant company culture. In my redesign of the site, I felt it was important to not only modernize their site, but also to help their personality shine through.
Step One
Project Discovery
To get the project started, we conducted stakeholder interviews with the heads of the different departments within Southeast Mortgage. The goal of this exercise was to gather information about the needs of every aspect of the business, map out key themes and overlaps between departments, and formulate a plan of action on how to execute those goals. These key themes became the foundation for all of my decision making throughout the remainder of the project.
Some of the key themes identified in stakeholder interviews:
- Create clearly defined user paths for website visitors seeking a mortgage or wanting to refinance.
- Highlight the ease and transparency of their mortgage process and getting pre-approved.
- Create a destination for Realtors and Builders wanting to partner with Southeast Mortgage.
- Use testimonials from all user personas to demonstrate their extremely high satisfaction rate.
- Showcase the company culture and personality through videos, photography, and social media feeds.
Step Two
Moodboard
The moodboard phase of this project was extremely collaborative with the client, which really helped me figure out exactly what they were looking for in the next stages of the website redesign. Many times, clients struggle to visualize examples used in moodboards and how it could be applied to their site – not Southeast Mortgage. Within a few iterations and some insightful discussion I had a clear direction of where to take their website. Below are some examples pulled from our final Invision moodboard that were strong influences in my wireframes, and subsequently, design.
Step Three
Sitemap & Wireframes
Coming out of discovery I knew I had an organizational challenge on my hands when it came to sitemap. Their previous site was difficult to navigate and there was no clear segmentation based on the user’s end goal. Because building trust and telling their story as a company was a priority for them, we organized the new sitemap accordingly. Getting specific and insightful information from the moodboard process made creating the wiresframes straightforward. It was all about strategically using some of content types pulled from our examples to best tell their story. I was also lucky enough to collaborate early and often with their content team so that what we were creating was perfectly bespoke to their new copy.
Step Four
Design
