Overview

Enlighten took a contract to redesign the entire site for large home-builder Richmond American homes in 2009. This project encompassed their entire consumer facing site, which including home listings, maps, detailed home information, and contact options.

Challenges

• 2009 was a terrible year for the home building market, and our stakeholders were hyper-sensitive to pricing issues.
• All of our work was reviewed by an 8-person committee, which put considerable stress on our timeline.
• The top stakeholder did not have a good understanding of technology (he had his emails printed every morning by his secretary).
• This project was large enough to have two UX designers. I came on the project part-way through as the supporting UX resource, so I had to get up to speed quickly.

Results

While the project was delayed due to multiple unplained iterations and delayed reviews from the customer, we did eventually deliver a site which the lead executive stakeholder was very happy with. While they have since done another redesign, you can see aspects of Enlighten’s work in the current Richmond American Homes site.

Process

As mentioned above, I joined the project while it was in-progress. The workload was overwhelming the UX designer assigned ot the project and a graphic designer had quit the project. I reviewed the existing customer research and Statement of Work, as well as existing deliverables that the client was not happy with. I created an extensive functional specification, wireframes, and IA diagrams of the entire site to present to the client, and worked for several weeks closely to make additional iterations. As the project entered development, I continued to work with our development and QA team to ensure that the final result was easy to use and met the client’s requirements.

My artifacts and deliverables

• IA diagrams
• Wireframes
• Hundreds of pages of specifications

Contact me if you are interested in seeing examples of deliverables for the Richmond American Homes project.