Client
Catholic Faith Technologies
Dates
February 2021 - May 2021
Services
UX Research, Product Design, Front-End Development, Content Strategy
Project Overview
My Catholic Faith Delivered provides engaging online catechetical courses for Catholics of all ages. Since it's founding in 2008, it has helped provide information and assessments to millions of Catholics in over 12,000 parishes and dozens of dioceses across the country and around the world. In additional to offering high quality catesese curriculum, it is also a full church management LMS that allows parish leaders to manage courses, administer assessments, oversee progress and many other to empower catechist to fully optimize formation of all their leaners.
From the beginning MCFD partnered with many leading Catholic organizations and dioceses to provide high level training content. Many dioceses also used the software to create there own training that they could individually resell. It became apparent over time that the content of the many different providers should be centralized and thus MCFD's Faith Formation Hub was first envisioned.
It was my job to bring this centralized store front formation hub to fruition. It was to be a place that all diocese could sell and share their content on, thus expanding their reach and offering. Also because of the many limitations experienced with the many e-commerces packages we had suffered through in the past, we decided it was best to move forward with a completely headless e-commerce system. The near limitless payment processing options would provide numerous advantages. It would also remove many if not all boundaries in regards to design but it did mean that we would be designing and developing a total e-commerce from the ground up. This would include a totally home grown system for product pages, category pages, subcategories pages, an inventory system, a payment gateway, and a check out system from login to receipt.
Since this was to be their new site there really wasn't user data we could assimilate or access up front. The plan was to get out an MVP version and then iterate once we could get data from users. With the homepage exploration we determined since there was a large amount of young kids and elderly adults looking for courses it was best to make it simple and easy for them to find their way, right away, into relevant offerings, thus improving the experience by removing all the other noise. The other two main purposes was to route individuals that wanted to learn more about classes in general to pages that gave more of an overview and those that were already enrolled, a quick place to access the login screens. The homepage also made it possible to showcase individual courses or series that might be trending, newly created courses, and even those that were under performing, to give them an extra boost.
Building a complete E-Commerce
Since we were building our own entire e-commerce, that would also be used with MCFDS's parent company, CD2 Learning and all of it's many resell partners, it was important that is highly scalable system and totally brand agnostic. The solution would have to be easily skinable to accomidate for seamless intergation into client's sites. Also since it was going to be a global solution it needed to have a store structure that could function for all the many different types of structures we had seen before. We wanted to support the creation and management of category pages, sub category pages and product pages with the MVP. As the product grew we would add features as clients needed them as that routinely funded the development of our systems. The example below our product and category system skinned as the MCFD offering.
An Intuitive Store Checkout
It was important for our users to be lead through the checkout process for our specific users. So we created the interface to be a bit of a wizard where users could see the steps they were on, what was next and that there was only a few steps left, so to not get discouraged as can be the case with elderly users. For institutions to get paid appropriately for their content it was mandatory for users to login or create a new account within the systems. From there they could review the purchase and proceed to make a payment. After purchase the login was used to access the course immediately.
In Conclusion
The MVP was a success! We were able to get the vital portions of the new headless e-commerce offering up and running as well as the MCFD Formation Hub from it. The Formation Hub was also a success allowing the Dioceses to easily cross sell their content, thus greatly expanding their reach and making MCFD a stronger market leader. The headless system removed all limitations we had experienced with payment processors opening a door to business we had to previously to turn away. The headless system also greatly removed almost all of our design and development limitations we had with prior systems. We were excited about the future with our new system now that we have proven proof of concepts fully demonstrated. We were able from the launch to collect data and refine the hub as needed as well as finish building out the necessary portions until we had a very lucrative and competitive e-commerce offering.