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Setting Higher Standards for Online Customer Experience in the Education Lending Industry

For over 30 years, Sallie Mae has been the leading U.S. provider of higher education financing services. One factor in maintaining this position has been Sallie Mae’s constantly-increasing offering of products and services designed to help customers manage complex school finances and climbing education costs. Recognizing the need to avoid a complicated, disjointed online customer experience as its offerings grow, Sallie Mae asked NavigationArts to develop a strategic vision of a single, cohesive online Web presence.

NavigationArts took the following steps to develop a strategic vision:

• A collaborative investigation with Sallie Mae to understand its market challenges and the needs of its consumer and partner audiences
• A heuristic assessment of the online process for finding and applying for loans across a broad range of websites
• A content inventory of Sallie Mae’s Web offerings to develop a blueprint for an integrated experience

Project results included:

• A comprehensive online strategy through information architecture and all related efforts are measured and managed
• Incorporation of user testing results into the visual design
• A complete visual redesign of the user interface to increase usability and better match the Sallie Mae brand
• Microsoft Content Management Server ASP.NET template implementation with custom user controls and intelligent front-end to back-end integration
• WYSIWYG editor implementation
• Consulting on CSS strategy and content re-use
• Theme-based CSS structure tied to intelligent ASP.NET backend