Motorcraft Training site
Product Design
2018
Art Direction
Project info
Challenge
The training registration process at a national automotive supplier was slow, paper-heavy, and fragmented across phone calls with trainers, managers, and accountants. This inefficiency created bottlenecks, reduced training participation, and limited the company’s ability to expand revenue through training programs.
Solution
As lead designer on a three-person digital team, I transformed the paper-based system into a centralized online portal. By mapping user journeys and creating streamlined workflows, the portal dramatically reduced administrative time, boosted training sign-ups, and directly increased company revenue.
Platform
Responsive Desktop Web Portal
Timeframe
4 months from my first meeting to the dev hand off
My Tasks
Information architecture, visual design, user research, interaction design, user interface design
The project when I started
Results
Deliverables:
One responsive web portal that delivered the following:
A 3-step registration flow that is still utilized today.
A one-stop website serving both corporate and dealership-level personnel.
Enabled training sign-up through a simplified, custom digital interface by persona.
Included functionality to input and track passing participants.
Integrated billing and payment workflows to replace manual processes.
Automated certificate generation and shipping for successful participants.
Impact:
Reduced administrative workload by digitizing multi-step paper processes.
Increased training participation, unlocking new revenue streams.
The project when completed
The impact of my work
From Launch to National Success
Generated a multi-million-dollar value when the portal was built by Alteris Group for Ford. With the site being a success utilized nationally, it continues to generate revenue for Alteris Group through hosting, copy, plus legal updates, and for Ford Motorcraft through training revenue.
The portal delivered a faster experience for everyone involved. It simplified the training process, planning time from 3 weeks to 3 days, increasing the amount of training completed from 30 a year to millions.
My Process
Research
The project began with in-person interviews of all the personas involved in the training process to map the entire training flow. I generated questions, took notes of each interview, and documented each persona's goals and pain points. The personas interviewed included:
The supplier’s regional coordinator,
A brand manager,
The course instructor,
A training manager, a
The certificate printer,
An automotive dealership employee who signs up for training often.
Synthesis
After documenting the process with the different personas, I was tasked with creating a journey map of the entire process. With the journey map created, I began sketching ideas on the interface for the different personas and validated the sketch ideas against the personas' journey and goals.
Research Outcomes
Through the interviewing process, my manager and I found that less training occurred because of how much time it took to confirm a course. The training manager had difficulty locating trainers since they had to call to check their locations across the county to see who was closest and available. This would lengthen the entire process to 3 to 4 weeks for planning.
Design Process
After validating sketches against the journey map created, I then worked on high-fidelity designs in Sketch. We revisited each persona with the high-fidelity prototypes for input and further tweaking of the design.
Developer Handoff
Once the design was complete, we had a final review with the clients using an Invision prototype that I created. The clients loved the final concept. From there, I assisted the development team with reviews to guarantee the finished portal was 1:1 and testing.
The Website Now
The website is still utilized. The portal is called Motorcraft University or MotorcraftU.com. The site had slight upgrades to the login and some screens, but if you download the course guide, you will see in screenshots that it's still using my original design.
