Category: DevOps

Bank First

The challenge

Recognising its members’ evolving expectations, Bank First and NOW Digital embarked on a strategic revamp of the customer experience provided to members. As part of our long partnership with Bank First and the continuous improvement program, we uncovered that despite its strong reputation and dedication to customer service, it faced difficulties with its existing website. While functional, it was built on a traditional monolithic architecture, which limited flexibility, scalability, and the ability to deliver dynamic content efficiently.

The solution

Our deep understanding of member needs and market trends underpinned the solution, ensuring that the redesigned website would meet and exceed customer expectations. Bank First’s website overhaul takes a deeper understanding of the customer experience and utilises a headless architecture approach to deliver greater flexibility and content that can be used more efficiently across key digital channels while maintaining a consistent customer experience.

Streamlined customer experiences

Simplifying interaction ensures members navigate the website effortlessly and quickly find what they need. With intuitive navigation, clear information architecture, and seamless transitions, Bank First ensures simplicity and convenience for members and their website goals.

Enhanced flexibility and headless architecture

The headless architecture has given Bank First the flexibility to adapt and evolve its digital experiences rapidly. Content updates and feature enhancements can be deployed independently without disrupting the customer experience.

Scalability and future-readiness

Bank First positioned itself for future growth and innovation by adopting a headless approach on Contentful. The decoupled architecture provided the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt to changing market trends, emerging technologies, and evolving customer expectations.

The redevelopment of Bank First’s website using a headless architecture represented a significant milestone in the bank’s digital transformation journey. By embracing modern technologies and methodologies, Bank First enhanced its online presence and delivers members superior digital experiences.

Coles Liquor

The background

With some of the most recognisable liquor brands in Australia and as part of the commitment to right price, right place and right time, Coles needed to deliver highly targeted online experiences for their customers. The business needed to grow key performance metrics such as transaction value, frequency of purchase and customer top-of-mind awareness.

The challenge

There has never been a time in retail history where customers have had greater access to brands. Only matched by a customer’s willingness to share every experience with anyone who will listen.

Coles recognised that to differentiate themselves from the competition, a focus on showcasing their individual liquor brands (Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice Liquor Market) was key to drive brand advocacy. Essential to brand advocacy is trust, and integral to trust is ensuring the brand websites were reliable, fast, and always available.

The solution

Coles and NOW Digital undertook a review and audit of the core shopping experience to understand how customers made purchases. What part does price, delivery options and product details make in the decision-making process? How can we simplify the onboarding process? How can we further promote loyalty and member-only offer?

As an extension to the Coles internal team, we utilised our design system to develop reusable-components and built websites for all three brands under the Coles Liquor umbrella.

Highly optimised customer buying journey focused on conversion

Impactful storytelling with high quality imagery, product details and clear call-to-action for add-to-cart and checkout has proven to be vital in assisting customers through to purchase.

Consistency, reliability and always online

Overcoming limitations, we worked with Coles to centralise the technical delivery of all websites to increase efficiency and reduce management costs. With the deployment of the new websites, visits have increased (by over 100%), transactions are faster, and website outages have been reduced to zero.

City of Darebin

The background

Delivering a range of services to one of the largest and most diverse communities in Victoria, Darebin City Council has made a commitment to better engagement through online services and digital footprint. The suite of digital tools has been prioritised as the platform to create highly engaging and visible experiences for a truly connected community.

The challenge

Citizens need to feel like they belong in Darebin and be confident to engage with the Council. The expectations of connected experiences have changed the way councils need to operate – the challenge is how to blend organisational structure with the needs of the community to deliver services seamlessly to citizens where they are looking. Darebin City Council wanted to centralise the delivery platform of their brand websites while promoting relevant services that were not obviously available.

The solution

Darebin and NOW Digital stepped into the shoes of the community to understand their wants and translate them into needs. As a blended team, we defined what it means to deal with your local council and removed the barriers stopping citizens from discovering exactly how big a part their local council plays in their daily lives.

Prototyping smarter digital experiences, tailored to the needs of the community.

The goal is to bring the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders to create a shared vision on how to deliver council services to the community. The discovery phase produced interactive prototyping of the experience Darebin is delivering to the community – a tangible, engaging, and clear feasibility of the solution.

Centralised digital experience platform to manage council services

Harnessing the power of the digital experience can only truly be realised in a connected state. We needed a deeper understanding of the requirements of each Council brand and ensure adequate representation in the solution. While striving for a centralised management solution and reusable components, we also wanted to ensure that each Council brand had an identity and voice of its own.

Tracking progress and increasing citizen engagement

Empowering Darebin to own the engagement from initial interaction through to advocacy means that the problems that are solved are the problems that are important to the community. With progress comes confidence and the willingness to ‘get involved’ and builds the continuous improvement culture that underpins the strategic direction of Darebin Council.

YMCA Victoria – Virtual Y

Faced with the closure of most of their leisure facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, YMCA had to pivot and rapidly move towards an online-only model of delivering content and services.

In conjunction with YMCA, NOW Digital developed what is now known as the Virtual Y, a secure online platform created to provide new and existing members with access to a variety on online content.

The YMCA – Virtual Y will be expanded to accept payments online for premium content, creating a new and exciting revenue stream for the YMCA.

Australian Council of Superannuation Investors

ACSI is helping ASX-listed companies to better manage their environmental, social and governance risks.

ACSI partnered with NOW Digital to build a tool to enable ACSI and their members to improve the retirement savings of millions of Australians by being more effective in influencing companies to better manage their environmental, social and governance risks. NOW, through discovery workshops gained the domain knowledge to successfully design and develop a web-accessible platform solution.

YMCA Victoria

A consolidated network

NOW was tasked with consolidating the full suite of service offerings into a centrally-managed system, giving YMCA the ability to manage their digital messaging to their customers.

Working closely with YMCA’s digital team, we have delivered a system that speaks intimately to each customers needs when they need it, for a true personalised experience.

Bank First – Refinancing

At Bank First, they are invested in you.

As part of Bank First’s expansion into customer refinancing, NOW Digital was tasked with extending the reach of Home First’s brand, by designing and developing a new refinance section.

Customer-centric design, backed by data.

With a strong focus on providing customers with clear and concise data to compare and make educated decisions, NOW Digital developed a Home Loan Refinancing Calculator. The features and functionality of the calculator comparison tool where heavily dictated by real-time user feedback on prototypes and designs.

Bank First wanted to deliver a tool that was detailed enough to give their customers a clear picture of where they stood with regards to their home loan, with clear expectations of what the next steps in the process were going to be.

Dairy Australia

Included in NOW’s responsibility was an audit of a previous web development within the environment as well as the development of a ‘code of practice’ for all future work across the digital supplier panel and ongoing implementation of best practice retrospectively and on all new project work.

Lead agency

A key requirement of Dairy Australia was to find a lead agency with extensive Sitecore experience that would work in an honest and open relationship providing guidance on not simply design & development, but across the digital spectrum including internal training, and marketing strategy.

Victorian Managed Insurance Authority

Migration and immediate improvement

The Victorian Managed Insurance Authority (VMIA) enlisted NOW Digital to perform a technology audit of a previous web development upon Sitecore CMS. VMIA subsequently migrated all ongoing services to NOW Digital, including a refactoring project to re-architect the Sitecore integration to improve CMS administration and front end functionality.

Ongoing integration and improvement

After successfully completing the technology audit and migration of services, NOW Digital is currently assisting VMIA in longer term functionality improvements, including implementing a responsive framework as well as a new portal development and increased backend system integration.

VicSuper

VicSuper enlisted to NOW Digital to takeover management and development of their Sitecore based sites in 2014. NOW Digital completed a technical report on the existing codebase, and upgraded to Sitecore Experience Platform (XP), and implemented ongoing support and optimisation services.

Recently a complete ground up redevelopment of the VicSuper site was launched featuring a simplified interface to guide users to their desired outcome, on a robust, cloud based architecture.

Australian Maritime Museum

Australian National Maritime Museum - NOW Digital

A new major integration project currently underway involves brining the 50,000+ artefacts the museum has in its overall collection from their backend asset management system, allowing the public access to the full collection 24/7.

Utilising the Microsoft Azure platform offered NOW Digital a secure and flexible development, deployment, and scaling option for any sized web application for Australian National Maritime Museum’s current and future requirements.

Consumer Affairs Victoria

Consumer Affairs Victoria recently contracted NOW Digital to undertake a full rebranding and UX re-architecture of their website, the primary goal being to deliver a more user-friendly, device-friendly and intuitive way to find information quickly.

Prototyping delivers results

NOW organised and conducted extensive prototyping and user testing with members of the general public to validate Consumer Affairs Victoria’s new website design. Innovative menu structures designed to operate across multiple devices and context-sensitive breadcrumbs were key features targeted, allowing key learnings to be applied back into artwork early in the project and help deliver the best possible user experience.

Full WCAG 2.0 AA compliance

NOW delivered a modern, fully-responsive user interface while maintaining full WCAG 2.0 AA compliance across multiple audits by independent accessibility consulting firms. The website uses innovative menu behaviours, validated through extensive user testing and prototyping, and responsive layouts to deliver a ground-breaking user experience across all devices, while leveraging integration with ReadSpeaker and SoundCloud to provide assistive technology support and provide a truly accessible experience to Victorian consumers.

Manheim Auctions

Simplifying the user experience

Manheim’s new site was required to extend and educate new and current customers across desktop and touch devices, whilst not interrupting what they were currently utilising. In-house stakeholders needed equal content distribution, so the design needed to heed to all product verticals, whilst still allowing end users to easily navigate to their preferred vehicle search.

Extending our services

Initially a strict User Experience project utilising focus group facilitation, card sorting, wireframing, prototyping (for user testing) and user interface design, the project extended beyond to front-end coding and full technical implementation, integrating with on-site technical and infrastructure team.