MotoRefi website redesign

Role: Senior UX Designer, MotoRefi

Program: Figma 

Additional Talent: Engineering: Mike Spainhower (VP Engineering), Ben McNiel, Ricardo Kreyhsig, Dave Craine, Don Peterkofsky; Marketing: Todd McDonald (VP Marketing), Charlotte Taylor; Product: Seth Cousins (VP Product & Analytics)

I joined MotoRefi mid-way through our rebranding process led by Fuzzco, a design agency. Fuzzco provided a logo and brand palette, along with initial concepts for the home page and the first page of the customer application; it was my job to expand the brand across MotoRefi’s digital platforms. 

I began by conducting exploratory research and analysis of our competitors’ sites, as well as similar adjacent industries and experiences our customers would encounter. Our data showed that 65% of traffic to our site came through a mobile device, which anchored mobile-first mentality in my design and information hierarchy recommendations. 

To solicit feedback from stakeholders, I developed a fully functional interactive wireframe to test the site’s flow and review content. This prototype was then expanded into high-fidelity. I structured the site around an 8pt grid in 12 columns for responsive breakpoints, building off of Material UI and React styled components. Engineering developed a templated framework on a headless CMS that would allow for future co-branding and whitelabeling of our product. 

I built and maintained MotoRefi’s design system and component library in Figma for consistent use across files, which Engineering used to develop base React components. I leveraged Figma’s developer tools to facilitate direct collaboration and easy HTML/CSS translation of my designs into code, and worked closely with Engineering to implement style guidelines. I also generated all web assets with a bias toward styled .svg files for maximum flexibility.

We faced a press deadline announcing $8.6M in Series A fundraising in a matter of weeks. To meet this deadline, we defined our MVP for the website, re-skinned the CSS of our existing customer application rather than fully rebuild, and I rebuilt our 8 lead partner landing pages in Unbounce, a third party app, in order to test efficacy and reduce load on Engineering resources. 

This resulted in our ability to launch our rebrand and marketing site on a fast turnaround, allowing for iterative fast-follow improvements. Our customers’ experience on our application aligned the updated brand without requiring massive changes to the tech stack or code base, which would have been nearly impossible to effectively test in the time frame we had. And our landing pages are now replicable and iterable without requiring Engineering resources. 

“Cass worked really well bringing UX perspective to our work with an outside design and UX firm as we were re-designing our site. Cass came in mid-redesign and, while we were concerned bringing a UX Designer in mid-stream on a project like this, Cass jumped right in and was able to provide helpful insights and feedback right away”

Kevin Bennett, CEO, MotoRefi