Nordic Naturals | Mobile Responsive Website
Owning 40% of the fish oil market, Nordic Naturals struggled with a secure and stable online environment, needed to re-platform their experience and also create a mobile responsive version of their site…an important feature Nordic’s old site had never possessed. Nordic hired Optaros by MRM McCann to design and build a Magento 2, B2C eCommerce experience that could scale to support 1 billion in online revenue. Optaros hired me to design and implement the mobile responsive user experience, which included overhauling their site map, establishing a pattern library and designing nearly 100 screens across two breakpoints.
Employing a mobile-first approach and incorporating expandable drawers for supplemental description and materials, I condensed information in a way that made them available to users to educate themselves if they wished, but did not make Nordic's wealth of scientific information vital to their purchasing flow; there if they needed it, but unnecessary to expand if they want to make a quick buy. Nordic's new site was the first step in a direction that allowed greater navigation from Home to Point-of-Sale, and leveraged them onto a platform that allowed greater conversion, a more robust social implementation, and a Loyalty Rewards program among other features to improve engagement, revenue and most importantly, position their brand for a bold new evolution.
LearnIt | Parental Control Mobile App
The developers behind LearnIt wanted to create an experience for parents with concerns about their children's screen time, particularly in a world where over half of children in the United States — 53 percent — own a smartphone by the age of 11 and 84 percent of teenagers have their own phones. To do that, LearnIt developed a screen-time management solution with education at it's core, where children learn to earn screen time through educational videos from names like Ted-ED, PBS Kids etc. They hired me originally to create a pattern library and design three key experiences—Parent login, Child Login, Child Experience—across two breakpoints. But when research began, I discovered the need to revise the user experience for multiple users on a single device, as well as rethink the core "learn-to-earn" experience itself.
Working from a client's rough requirements and features list, along with sketches, I defined a feature value matrix and app flows from which wires were built, then visual designs. Aside from the patterns and screens, I adjusted the core earning experience by improving the expectations around locking and unlocking a child's device after earning; adding additional children to a single device; interactions for controlling parental controls and setting "earn" parameters; and establishing progression expectations for learning modules along with success/fail messaging for earning time.. In the end, LearnIt launched on Google Play in June of 2020, has consistently maintained high reviews, and is slowly building a devoted and growing, passionate base of monthly users.
Thursday Boot | Email Design Exercise
The Thursday Boot Company creates hand-crafted, high-quality footwear built for work & play, with the durability of work boots and sophistication of fashion boots. Thursday Boot's marketing emails have consistently been clever, tongue in cheek and well-designed and I took it upon myself to take a pass at creating an email for them to promote their Captain boot in a new, brown color. The below concept & copy is mine; images © Thursday Boot Company.
“Now in Brown” was the campaign slogan behind the email, but my concern arose in that hinging a message on color alone might rob the email of contextual potential. To that end, the idea was to seize (no pun intended) on brown as a color to envision a sense of nostalgia (brown and sepia in old photos and books) and the rich shade of education (jackets, book bags, dress shoes + desks, wood paneled walls) while pairing it with using “Captain” to evoke a reference to the classic film Dead Poet’s Society. As Thursday Boot made use of popular culture in past emails, this felt like an approach which would provide a platform to not only highlight the new color, but do it within a sense of depth and nuance hopefully recognizable to Thursday Boot’s target demographic. I decided to retain Thursday Boot’s key fonts (Cheltenham and Avenir Next), both which fit the refined, cultured tone and theme as pulled from the film. Generous padding was created between modules/ components to allow the design to breathe, and the email was built at a breakpoint of 1200px but is eminently scalable to mobile viewports.
