Industry | Government Relations

Under the hood: Updating the NCBON UI

WEB PRODUCT MANAGER

Information Technology - User Experience Transformation

NCBON.com Website Redesign to Increase Awareness, Engagement, and Improve the User Experience.

MY CONTRIBUTION

Managed the strategy, roadmap, planning, design, development, testing, deployment, and ongoing optimization of NCBON.com. Conducted user research to identify pain points, define personas, and map user journeys, translating insights into data-driven recommendations that improved user experience and engagement. Leveraged qualitative and quantitative analytics to prioritize a backlog of high-impact enhancements aligned with business and customer needs.

Partnered with cross-functional stakeholders to gather business and technical requirements, translating them into well-defined user stories and acceptance criteria for engineering teams. Presented product strategies, wireframes, recommendations, and performance results to stakeholders and executive leadership, ensuring alignment on product vision and roadmap.

Evaluated feature requests and competing priorities to maximize business value, balancing customer needs, technical feasibility, and organizational goals. Drove continuous product improvement through user feedback, experimentation, analytics, and iterative testing. Maintained a consistent user experience across multiple digital platforms while creating and managing web content using WYSIWYG and HTML editors.

THE PROBLEM

The website presented significant usability challenges, with an unintuitive navigation structure that made it difficult for users to locate the information needed to complete key tasks. Additionally, the site relied on an outdated, non-responsive design that provided a suboptimal user experience across devices and failed to leverage modern web technologies and design best practices.

ADDRESSING PROBLEMS

• Does the website need any additional functionality?

• Does the overall visual aesthetic satisfy users?

• Is the landing page compelling?

• Can users locate the information they need?

I concentrated on understanding visitor behavior and needs. Attention was given to how content was organized, structured, and labeled.

AFTER ADDRESSING PROBLEMS, MY GOALS WERE TO:

• Design an intuitive, accessible user interface that enabled users to efficiently complete key tasks and achieve their goals

• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to ideate features, define functionality, and shape an end-to-end user experience aligned with user and business needs

• Redesign the site's information architecture, navigation, and content hierarchy to improve discoverability, organization, and usability

• Enhance the overall user experience by reducing friction throughout critical user journeys and simplifying interactions

• Modernize the website with a responsive, mobile-first design that improved accessibility, usability, and performance across devices

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

I leveraged web analytics, heatmaps, and user behavior data to identify usability issues, uncover friction points, and prioritize opportunities for product improvement. Analytics provided deep insights into customer behavior—including device usage, traffic sources, navigation patterns, engagement metrics, and high-value content—which informed product decisions and roadmap priorities.

Using these insights, I developed data-informed wireframes and experience improvements grounded in both quantitative analytics and qualitative customer feedback collected through surveys, chat interactions, email, and usability testing. User research and click analysis revealed where users encountered obstacles, enabling me to refine the site's information architecture, content hierarchy, navigation, and labeling. This iterative, evidence-based approach resulted in a more intuitive, accessible, and user-centered experience that made information easier to find and key tasks easier to complete.

CONCLUSION

Great design begins with understanding the problem before proposing a solution. Successful digital products are built by first understanding users—their goals, behaviors, pain points, and journeys—and then designing experiences that help them accomplish those goals with minimal friction.

A successful website redesign requires thoughtful planning, user research, data analysis, and close collaboration across stakeholders. By analyzing user journeys and existing workflows, teams can identify opportunities to streamline experiences, validate assumptions, and uncover why certain features are embraced while others go unused. These insights enable informed product decisions that create intuitive, user-centered experiences while delivering meaningful business value.

DELIVERABLES

• Project Charter – Defined the project's vision, objectives, scope, stakeholders, and success criteria.

• Project Plan – Outlined the execution strategy, timeline, resources, risks, and governance.

• Milestones & Timeline – Established key project phases, deliverables, dependencies, and target completion dates.

• Functional Requirements – Documented business requirements, user needs, feature specifications, and acceptance criteria.

• Wireframes – Created low-fidelity layouts to define information architecture, page structure, user flows, and functionality.

• High-Fidelity Mockups – Produced visual designs that demonstrated the final user interface, branding, interactions, and responsive experience prior to development.