Combining the Sitecore CMS with Intelligent UX

Not-for-profit managed care organization BMCHP had two main goals for their redesign: they needed to make it easier for the uninsured to self-select the best subsidized health insurance plan for themselves and their families and debut a new, commercial insurance product aimed at small businesses and brokers.

How We Helped

Genuine biggest challenge in drafting BMCHP’s new look would be to clearly articulate differences between the not-for-profit’s three health insurance product lines—MassHealth, Commonwealth Care, and Employer Choice. The new look is friendly, clean, and straightforward and uses human photography to help users identify with each product, making the integration of BMCHP’s new Employer Choice / Commonwealth Choice insurance for small businesses seamless.

Central to managing the user’s clickstream was the development of the BMCHP Eligibility Quiz, which serves as a virtual guide for the uninsured who want to become educated about the complexities of subsidized health insurance. Instead of trekking to the BMCHP medical center or sifting through the state’s lengthy eligibility requirements on paper, users can click through the Eligibility Quiz and determine which of BMCHP’s insurance products meets their needs by simply answering a few questions.

From Spectator to Subscriber: Driving Out-of-Market Sales

Always on the lookout for new sales drivers, DirecTV wanted to improve its annual NFL Sunday Ticket giveaway platform, Ultimate Displaced Fan (UDF). The satellite TV provider caters to existing and prospective out-of-market subscribers through its exclusive NFL Football Package, which provides a plethora of enhanced football content in a device-agnostic framework.  Genuine’s challenge was to boost sales for the NFL Football Package via the reinvented UDF platform.

How We Helped

The Ultimate Displaced Fan platform is a highly modular, PHP-based custom CMS that allows out-of-market NFL fans to sign up as contestants for the NFL Sunday Ticket contest. For the 2010 and 2011 iterations of UDF, we wanted to bring new life to the site’s look by making the platform more exciting for NFL fans. UDF’s administrative interface enables DirecTV and its PR affiliates to moderate and evaluate entries without leaving the site, while an array of voting features and Facebook integration tools on the front end enable contestants to rate entries based on quality and other criteria. From a systems perspective, we ensured that the UDF platform was built in such a way that DirecTV can reuse the CMS for campaigns from year to year by simply styling the front end.

Above and beyond UDF’s lead capture functionality, the platform is littered with analytics markers that enable Genuine’s Digital Media team to monitor performance and inform the strategy for future social media campaigns, such as DirecTV’s Quarterback Challenge and Snowballs of Flurry Facebook games.

2-Click Automated System Deployment

SurveySpot wanted to refresh the outdated look of their outdated survey website, as well as expand its functionality so that the website could function as a multi-instance application. Extracting value from SurveySpot’s audience involves seeking out and engaging with more and more narrow markets, so SurveySpot needed Genuine to extend their system so that it could deploy entirely new, consumer-facing instances of its front end all the while interfacing with a third party subscription database that stored consumer data.

How We Helped

By working with the Sitecore CMS in the .NET programming language and the VODCA framework, Genuine drafted a sophisticated integrations plan that involved hooking up the SurveySpot registration system with the brand’s existing third party repository for subscriptions. We designed the back end to rapidly sync with outside data sources while building multiple layers of system performance redundancy to handle the thousands of users whose interaction with the site could create crippling stresses on the entire system. Finally, we created an automated system deployment framework that allowed SurveySpot administrators to create new instances of the SurveySpot parent.

The end result was a two-click interface that made slicing up their consumer demographic a painless process. SurveySpot administrators can now deploy new instances of their survey collection website while sending all their data to the same centralized repository.

UX Overhaul and Mastering Conversion Rates

Consumer packaged goods superpower RB Foods needed to restructure French’s Food Service, the umbrella website for its condiment brands. In addition to clearly delineating the benefits of each brand’s product line to restaurant operators while keeping navigation between brands simple, RB Foods sought to dynamically cross-promote its products and improve overall conversion rate.

How We Helped

Genuine started the French’s Food Service makeover by unifying the three brands’ separate websites under a single visual design that preserved the defining characteristics of each product line. We wanted to communicate the family friendly atmosphere of French’s Foods, the cheeky personality of Frank’s Red Hot, and the Western appeal of Cattlemen’s while keeping the user anchored in French’s Food Service’s overarching interface.

In the “Culinary Center,” we transformed the output of multiple existing recipe databases to suit the French’s Food Service restaurant operator audience, which included indicating values for bulk quantities and increased serving sizes, as well as adding the ability to filter by brand, menu type or type of protein. We made sure the product sample request forms were always one click away. In addition to information about front of house solutions and mixology, the new Merchandising and Rebates sections of the website allow operators to find multi-brand offers. Finally, we created a sales rep finder that enables restaurant operators to locate contact information local to their area.

The Power of Science-Driven Care in Digital Formats

Children’s Hospital Boston wanted to showcase its science-driven care in a way that was more welcoming to parents and prospective employees. But this simple trajectory for the redesign meant a serious undertaking for Genuine Interactive. Children’s Hospital is not just one of the world’s leading pediatric hospitals, it’s one of the world’s leading research institutions producing inventions, drugs, instruments, and research that extend outside of the world of pediatrics, and so Genuine needed to capture the full scope of the hospital’s efforts in digital form.

How We Helped

Rather than focusing on building an online brand around the institution itself, Genuine turned its focus on the people within the organization who make it special.  We created a home page that features world-changing Children’s Hospital Boston inventors as well as their inventions in an XML-powered Flash carousel.  Our goal was to think about the site more as the cover of Time rather than the front page of your average website.

We also created the TIDO Invention Database to help Children’s Hospital keep its inventors and researchers fresh in the minds of venture capitalists.  The database opens a continuous line of communication between Children’s TIDO office and potential partners. This custom-developed application is designed to let partners easily search for inventions and researchers through a number of criteria. The active filtering allows the partner to change criteria and change results in real time.

Flash-Based Interactivity Boosts Micro-Donations
in Drupal-Powered CMS

Plimoth Plantation had an array of objectives when it came to the redesign of their museum’s website, chief among them to motivate micro-donations from younger donors, provide an educational resource for students and teachers, and enable visitors to plan their visit to the museum. To that end, Genuine’s strategy was to build a new appeal and interactivity into the micro-donation process.

How We Helped

Genuine selected Drupal as the CMS of choice for Plimoth’s new website. We wanted to immerse visitors in full-screen, panoramic photos and videos that would reflect the immersive experience that the museum’s theater of the past offered.

The Flash-based interactive donations page focused on illustrating ways visitors could help, from helping students “time travel to the 1600s” to keeping the “Mayflower II sailing into history.” Overall, the website’s clean new look and our slimmed-down IA allowed for a breadth of content that made it easier for visitors to find the information they needed quickly and without losing depth. By carrying over the site’s design into the museum’s Magento-powered shopping cart, we made eCommerce a seamless experience for visitors.

Drupal and Flash at the Crossroads of the Web/Video Convergence

In redesigning the MFA website, Genuine wanted to capture the sheer size of the museum and its extensive collections in the user experience. The MFA wanted their new website to reflect the very personal, awe-inspiring experience visitors of the museum share when interacting with its collections. We did this through powerful photography, engaging full-screen video, and a clean, navigable user interface that encouraged exploration.

How We Helped

The museum experience is an interactive experience, so user interaction was a big part of the redesign. On top of implementing a comprehensive search that enables visitors to access all the museum’s artwork online, we carefully categorized all the museum’s collections to make it easy for visitors to find artwork. We also empowered visitors to tag individual pieces, store collections in their My MFA Account, and share artwork with the social web.

Simplicity in an Open Source Showcase: Enter Drupal

Massachusetts-based Tribe® Hummus needed a new look and new messaging to get across the value of its all natural hummus product. Genuine timed the launch of the site (which we built in popular open source platform Drupal) to follow up the release of their newest product, the Tribe Origins™ organic line, and chief among the goals in the redesign was to represent the product’s wholesome authenticity.

How We Helped

To establish a strong foundation for the brand’s digital presence, first Genuine needed to anchor the company’s social media properties in the website and build a community around its recipes.

We told the story of Tribe in vibrant summer colors, high quality product photography, and animations of the fresh ingredients that go into Tribe’s hummus. Tribe also wanted to showcase the passion of its senior management, who have extensive backgrounds in food prep and distribution. To this end, Genuine created an attractive Ask the Tribe Q&A that featured the staff’s stories.

Superefficiency in Search: LINQ-Based Filtering via Cached Datasets

Sullivan Tire needed two key features to succeed on the Web: a powerful online pricing and lead generation tool, and a more robust method for searching for tires online. Genuine also saw an opportunity to strengthen the tire company’s web presence through enhanced online marketing.

How We Helped

Just as Sullivan Tire’s needs were twofold, Genuine’s approach was two-pronged: We provided an engaging and creative new interface for the end user while building powerful integrations in the back end. We featured an interactive, Flash-based, behind-the-wheel front page design and streamlined navigation to guide the user seamlessly from point of origin to intended destination.

Behind the scenes, we optimized Sullivan’s tire search functionality to improve speed and efficiency, while creating an online tool that provides a tire diagnosis in real time. Our back-end developers created a LINQ-based searching and filtering module that queried a cached dataset in .NET which we parsed nightly into an XML dataset. Our goal was to cater to users’ needs by minimizing distractions and maximizing usability through carefully designed site architecture.

Immersive Video Experiences Through Flash-Based 3D Architecture

Creat Studios wanted to revamp their brand with a portfolio that showcased their creativity and passion for creating digitally immersive games. They also wanted to foster social networking and video-sharing to enhance the experience for clients and extend their reach to potential employees.

How We Helped

Genuine created a powerful 3D wheel of games through a combination of Flash wizardry and Papervision3D as the initial front page experience. Visitors could select titles from this 3D wall of games to dive directly into Creat’s portfolio.

Individual titles in the portfolio have sharable widescreen video and interrelated title recommendations, which encourages users to further explore the site. Genuine also devoted a good portion of the website’s infrastructure to detailed team profiles and an in-depth company overview, so as to attract prospective hires to consider working at Creat Studios.