Overland Experts

Overland Experts is a distributed training company, dedicated to educating the public, commercial, and military clients on how to safely drive in off-road scenarios. With locations in North Carolina, Connecticut, and Utah, their immersive classes present students with unique opportunities to learn how to adapt to any obstacle and how to respect the terrain while doing so.

I ground all my work on the premise that understanding is the key to unlocking a path towards successful product. Kicking the project off, I set out to understand what the client needed from a newly redesigned website. I accomplished this by asking questions like:

+ What were their business goals?
+ What did they like in the old site?
+ Are there any other companies in the field that are visually inspiring?
+ What were the top 3 things they would want to change for the new site?
+ and many more

Ultimately, the three main points we came away with boiled down to:

The structure and redundancy of the navigation menu contributed heavily towards recreational users' confusion in moving throughout the site. Many of the menu options pointed towards similarly-designed pages with similarly-written content. This was an area where there was a lot of room for improvement.

Because of the redundancy of information and content, it made it hard to know what the clear CTA is to book a class, contact the company, etc.

Similar to the nav menu, the site overall had many needlessly internally-looping links, and no discernible approach to the overall structure of the information architecture.

With the existing challenges in mind, I set out to discover more about the competitors in the industry. I wanted to identify areas where OEX's site features had room for growth by looking at other companies in the field, such as DirtFish and Team O'Neil.

In almost all markers, features were more refined on competitors' websites.

Keeping the main challenges in mind, I applied and elaborated on new branding guidelines, created a completely re-designed responsive layout, and established a more cohesive look/feel to the overall flow of navigating the site, to include a custom API-backed checkout process.