Vida Homeloans is a new challenger mortgage lender, focusing on understanding market niches, designing well targeted products and clearly communicating the benefits of their proposition which will enable them to be a challenger within this market.

In 2016 Vida selected us to develop their brand guidelines, design and build of their website and re-skin their broker portal platform. The project brief focused on delivering a demonstrably easier experience for the main user group, mortgage intermediaries, than competitor websites along with creating visuals that really bring the brand to life and tell the story of ‘Modern Mortgage Lending'.

Our deep mortgage sector experience had given our team good grounding in what mortgage professionals need from a website. The main challenge for this project was to communicate the proposition to enable Vida to be the challenger within this market along with creating branding that will stand out from the crowd. We followed our user-centred design approach to get the perfect balance between user’s needs along with the business goals to deliver an intuitive and memorable experience.

Wireframes and prototypes played a major role when planning the user journey; this allowed us to rapidly wireframe the structure of the site through to prototypes, which was all tested with intermediaries at various stages throughout the process. One of the biggest benefits of prototypes is that they provided an intuitive, quick and easy way to get our ideas in front of key client stakeholders and intermediaries.

Giving business users within Vida full control of the website content in an easy to use interface, drag and drop interface, was a key requirement in the brief.

We delivered this by building the site on the Sitefinity Content Management System. In addition to market-leading content management, personalisation and marketing features Sitefinity’s extensibility also enabled our .NET developers to extend the core functionality to meet Vida’s specific project needs.

Ian Giles Marketing, Head of Marketing, gave us the following feedback:

“We wanted to work with an agency that employed the latest technology and project management techniques to achieve not just a website, but our greatest business asset. We also needed to get to market quickly with a proposition that felt fresh and different to our competitors. In Dock9, we found a partner that was agile, responsive and that matched our culture well. Their design work was inspiring and their implementation work was transparent and reliable.”