Sallie // Nitro College
Early in my tenure, Sallie Mae acquired Nitro College, a startup focused on building an affinity marketing business around student lending. I partnered with the founders to integrate their offering into Sallie Mae–a precursor to the EdTech products that would become core offerings.
The brand had low awareness and failed many accessibility standards–now required as part of a regulated company. This provided my team the opportunity to use it as a laboratory where we could craft new ways of working, designing, and testing.
Our work was driven by hypotheses and from the outset focused on several key goals: Reduce the bounce rate, increase the app signups, improve the emotional experience with the brand (as determined via qualitative testing), and improve accessibility (by achieving WCAG AA standards).
The final designs featured bolder colors, higher contrast, and were augmented by more emotive imagery and copy. Our concept outperformed the control by 10%.
Nitro College Homepage.
Nitro College. Early design system development.
Nitro College Mobile.
Nitro College for Tablet.
Nitro College Website. Working with a design system allowed for rapid production and experimentation.
Nitro College Blog Category Page.
College Search Finder.
Nitro College Category Page.
Nitro Dashboard Exploration.
Challenger Testing. Our design quickly took the lead and became the standard.