Navistar
My Role:
Tools:
Length:
Lead Designer, Client Relations, UX design, Brand Ambassador
Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, Keynote
9 months
My involvement
My company's relationship with Navistar got off to a rocky start. They had come to us with a request to redesign their website. Navistar is a global holding company that owns a dozen subsidiaries and does business in 90 countries world-wide. This was a very large ask with many difficult aspects to consider. 16 different redesign concepts had been presented to the client before I was asked to contribute a design. It was my direction that finally won the client's approval. From that point on, this was my project to lead. I managed a small creative team of three designers and one copywriter. The client was so pleased with our redesign that they also awarded us with the opportunity to redesign several of their subsidiary sites as well as their internal intranet site.
Process
Once the design direction was approved, I had to bring everyone together and level-set to make sure we were all on the same page. We showed the research we had done so far and outlined a clear direction on how we were going to proceed.
I helped to consolidate and distill pertinent information from numerous stakeholders in just as many countries. We then mapped out the current site and annotated what we could reuse, what we wanted to modify, and what we needed to create.
Next, I helped to design the wire frames and how we wanted to structure our content.
Then came the fun part. A large part of my design was relying on huge images that would fill the page and help to elevate their products to a hero level. We set guidelines for the photography and organized a three-week photoshoot that included locations in Brazil, India, and Texas.
Challenges
For this project I had to work with a development team from India. Because of the language barrier, it was imperative that my work was well organized, clear, concise, and devoid of anything that might cause confusion. From a creative layout perspective, we also had to make sure that all of our designs would accommodate the wide variety of copy lengths we would experience from various language translations.
However, one of our biggest challenges was just getting everyone on board with what we were doing. As you can imagine with a global holding company as big as Navistar, there were a lot of stakeholders from all across the globe. It was important for us to be able to implement their feedback while keeping as much of our original vision in tact as we could. One thing we did to help sell our idea and get our stakeholders excited was to create an internal facing promotional video.
Results
