The Institutes

I facilitated multiple UX workshops to help identify and solve for gaps within The Institutes’ online customer experience. I successfully expanded the client relationship from being development-only to include UX + UI design.

View Project TOC

ROLE

Lead UX Designer

TIME FRAME

9 Months

COMPANY

O3 World

Overview

The Institutes is a nonprofit organization focused on meeting the professional development needs of the risk management and insurance community. They have recently turned their eye toward their agency and brokerage audiences and are currently building the Producer Accelerator program, which is the first offering for these new audiences. To support this new program, The Institutes was looking to create a microsite focused on demonstrating the program’s value and educating potential partners on the variety of offerings it can provide to agents and brokers.

What I Did

This project was a collaborative partnership between Archer Group (now Bounteous) and O3 World. Archer handled the UX + UI design while O3 World was responsible for development and implementation. I was brought on to help solve for UX gaps identified during the development phase. Based on those gaps, I facilitated several UX workshops with The Institutes team to update the sitemap, individual pages and templates, and guide content strategy efforts. Over time, my role evolved and I took on the task of making UI updates as well.

The Institutes’ final sitemap. The color-coded dots represent which template each page will utilize.

A sample of content hierarchy templates for The Institutes redesign.

The Institutes homepage redesign (Courtesy of Bounteous) — The Institutes homepage redesign *(Courtesy of Bounteous)*

TIME TO TEST

In preparation for interactive prototyping, I created a robust design system and module guide that outlined the use case and functionality for each component on the site. This was also used by our development team as the single source of truth.

This engagement culminated with the creation of three separate prototypes based on test scripts created by Archer Group to facilitate usability testing sessions, which can be accessed via the TOC at the top of the page.

A snapshot of the module guide — our single source of truth

A glimpse into our functional requirements documentation

ALWAYS GROWING

Due to the success of this engagement, I was tapped to lead the redesign of The Institutes CPCU program, one of its premiere designations. As this project still in-progress, I am only able to show small portions of the UX process.