Phil Oye

About the project

Our client sponsor at GE Capital Market Services (GE CMS) had received an ultimatum from CEO Jack Welsh—“Get on the Web or find a new job”. How’s that for an incentive?

GE CMS is a subsidiary of GE Capital, which is one of the largest financial services companies in the world.

In this project we would create a secure extranet for downloading documents to support loan syndication (basically big, document-intensive, contracts to underwrite debt) and asset-backed commerical paper (investment grade bonds).

My role on the project

I was the lead information architect on a three person creative team. We had about six weeks to define and design both the user-facing site and the admin site.

The user-facing screens

The user-facing screens were quite straight-forward. We merely had to use the existing GE templates to provide login, registration, contact, and lists of documents for download.

We were able to do some quick up-front user research for needs analysis, but no prototype testing. Our process was to interview our clients and collaboratively create the site map and wireframes on whiteboards.

The site is by no means pretty, but the extent of our control over the visual design was limited to choosing the color palette (“Hmmm, do we like the ocean or the sand color palette?”).

The administration screens

The user-facing screens boiled down to document presentation. The admin site, due to the intense security requirements, was significantly more complicated and required extensive workflow and permissioning.