Nantahala Outdoor Center

Project Management

Overview

Identity

Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) is the nation’s largest outdoor recreation company. Over a million guests visit NOC annually enjoy more than 120 different river and land-based itineraries, learn to kayak at NOC’s world-renowned Paddling School, travel abroad with NOC’s Adventure Travel program, test the latest outdoor gear and shop at its LEED-certified flagship retail stores, or enjoy its resort amenities such as its three restaurants and multi-tiered lodging.

Core Activities

Project Management, Web Strategy, Integrations, Quality Assurance

The Ask

NOC’s former website was stable and often matched a lot of the print material that they coupled with it; however, it needed an updated visual feel and user experience.

Areas to solve for:

➤ Visually outdated
➤ Navigation was not intuitive—new users could get easily lost
➤ Website was not malleable and thus a lot of their content felt homogenous
➤ No direct transactions could be done from the homepage

Solution

Organizing their offerings into verticals and tying them together via a “plan your adventure” theme that spoke to newcomers without alienating returning customers.

The main focus of this project was geared towards organizing their four main verticals: Activities, Courses & Training, Lodging, and Dining. Formerly, there was no “start” and “end” point for a customer, so prior experience with the brand was necessary. In the current homepage there is now easy and direct access to information a user might be looking for with an additional Wishlist functionality that a user could leverage as a “shopping cart” to bundle their interests and save/share them. Bringing the physical customer experience to the digital landscape was the answer.

Methodology

To protect a legacy, we used a waterfall approach to confirm we crossed our t's and dotted our i’s.

The most common of approaches really coupled well with this project. Each phase of the project was broken out in chunks from Discovery all the way to Launch. Each phase had core deliverables that were thoroughly reviewed and then approved in order to move into the next phase. This was a massive site with a sizable architecture—when all was said and done, slow and steady resulted in a great site with lots of amazing functionality, a great user experience, and beautiful visual design.

Project Management

Due to its nature, we had weekly calls detailing deliverables in full. Scrums were held with the team to make sure programming led design due to the dev-intensive requirements of this website.

Production

I populated content while simultaneously performing QA. Population happened in a WordPress CMS backend using Advanced Custom Fields tailored specifically to each template + any syncing that needed to happen due to integrations.

Quality Assurance

QA was coordinated in a siloed manner (internal vs. client) and kept under a strict timeline. Prioritization, browser and device testing, and key functionality were all reviewed at this stage.

Let’s Connect

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