Alta Window Fashions

The setup

Alta's existing website was built solely to serve dealers. It was invisible to most consumers, non-compliant with modern accessibility standards, siloed from dealers' real-world sales activity, and outdated in both brand expression and UX patterns.

The problem

Alta's existing website was built solely to serve dealers. Key challenges:

There were no online scheduling tools, no meaningful content strategy, and no consistent design system. Worse, dealers lacked public-facing URLs, and consumers couldn't easily discover where to buy. In a post-COVID era when expectations for digital maturity had accelerated, Alta needed a complete strategic reset—not just a site refresh.

My role

With Alta I was responsible for establishing the vision, strategy, experience, and visual design from our RFP response through to the live site and the dealer portal. I was also the primary interaction for stakeholders, the leader of an in-person dealer summit, and frequent presenter to executive sponsors.

As the lead strategist and experience designer on this project, I was specifically responsible for:

The work with Alta demanded a wide variety of tactics and processes to help guide us effectively and build consensus among the myriad stakeholder groups.

Approach + process

The total range of the project encompassed discovery, information architecture, a design system, and a robust library of page templates mapped to a Contentful CMS build. Key to success, however, were the variety of discovery processes to help our team learn the industry, and the Alta team to learn where their opportunities were.

The solution

My deep discovery allowed us to highlight a few great opportunities for moving Alta forward. The organization was open to evaluating processes and making changes in order to deliver an improved and unique user experience to their prospects.

Outcomes + reflections

This project demanded high-level orchestration across functions, borders, and audiences. Navigating organizational challenges and bringing along disparate stakeholders without creating resentment or unhappiness was paramount. Ultimately I'm proudest of bringing Alta along from a less savvy digital organization to one with a robust digital presence, tooling, and documentation.

Among other successes, I introduced a modern visual presence that breaks from the monochrome, people-less norms of the category. The beige, context-less voids on many competitive homepages really drove my recommendations on assets and art direction. While driving the improved visuals, we were also able to deliver on time and on budget via Contentful CMS with reusable templates. In addition to the brand and savvy improvements, we also had substantial impact on other aspects of the business. We enabled the brand to begin direct-to-consumer engagement without alienating dealers. Previously dealers had been hesitant to facilitate any direct contact with consumers. We also helped Alta become one of the first in the space to offer structured conversion opportunities beyond price quotes—allowing users to self-select their level of detail and mapping that to expected points across the funnel.

What this work has challenged me to do:

• Build trust across dealer reps, execs, and marketers
• Translate under-articulated brand values into motion and emotion
• Navigate highly specific regulatory, regional, and accessibility challenges in both US and Canadian markets
• Deliver accurate vernacular in French Canadian

Ultimately, this was more than a site redesign. It was a digital transformation—one that gave Alta a voice in the consumer space without sacrificing the humanity and partnership that built their business in the first place.