Summary / TLDR
In today’s digital-first landscape, a website is often the primary touchpoint between a brand and its customers, making a well-designed, functional platform essential for success. Deal Street, a growing financial marketplace in New Zealand, recognized the need for an engaging, high-performance website to enhance its online presence and effectively communicate its services to potential clients. The aim was to build a platform that could seamlessly convey Deal Street’s unique value proposition in real estate and finance, attract new users, and simplify access to relevant financial resources.
To achieve this, our team employed a collaborative approach, combining cutting-edge design, efficient development practices, and rigorous quality assurance to create a website tailored to Deal Street’s vision and user needs. This case study explores the project’s journey—from conception to deployment—and highlights the solutions crafted to ensure Deal Street’s online presence aligns with its growth goals.
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Overview
Deal Street, a New Zealand-based platform, was established to help businesses reach a broader audience and increase revenue. Covering sectors from Food & Beverage and Health & Beauty to Automotive and Events, Deal Street provides an effective, free platform for companies to reach new customers, increase brand visibility, and drive customer engagement. To bring this mission to life, Deal Street required a robust, scalable, and visually engaging website that could handle high traffic, enable easy navigation across categories, and support various business types. Our team was tasked with designing, developing, testing, and launching a fully functional e-commerce platform to achieve these goals.
Services Provided
Website Design:
- User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design to create an attractive, intuitive layout..
Website Development:
- Full-stack development to build a responsive, scalable website.
Quality Assurance (QA):
- Rigorous testing across devices and browsers to ensure seamless performance.
Launch Support:
- Preparation and assistance for a smooth go-live, including monitoring and technical support.
Approach:
Discovery and Requirements Gathering:
- We started by conducting workshops with the Deal Street team to gain a thorough understanding of their vision, target audience, key features, and long-term growth goals. This helped us define user personas, prioritize platform features, and establish the design direction aligned with Deal Street’s mission to be a free, accessible platform.
Design Phase:
- Developed wireframes to outline the user journey, focusing on easy navigation and intuitive search functionality to help users find deals quickly.
- Created a visually appealing, modern design that balanced simplicity with engaging visuals, encouraging users to explore different categories (e.g., Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty).
- Ensured the design was responsive, so users on all devices could access the platform seamlessly.
Development Phase:
- Developed a robust website with a content management system (CMS) to manage deals across categories and monitor platform usage. We implemented a custom search and filtering system, enabling users to search by category, location, or popularity.
- Integration of Payment Gateways: While Deal Street’s service is free, we integrated secure payment options for potential future expansions, ensuring the platform could scale with new business models.
Quality Assurance:
- Conducted thorough testing across different browsers, devices, and screen sizes to ensure seamless functionality.
- Performed load testing to simulate high-traffic scenarios, making sure the platform could handle significant user volumes without compromising speed or functionality.
- Implemented security checks to safeguard user data and prevent unauthorized access.
Launch and Post-Launch Support:
- Coordinated a soft launch for limited users to gather feedback and address any last-minute issues.
- Provided 24/7 support during the official launch, monitoring performance and user interactions to make real-time adjustments.
Challenges:
Designing a Platform for Multiple Sectors:
- With diverse categories like Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, and Travel, each with its own user expectations, creating a design that worked cohesively across all categories was challenging.
Handling High Traffic and Data Load:
- Anticipating high user activity, we needed to ensure that the platform could handle thousands of users and numerous deals simultaneously without lag or downtime.
Ensuring User-Friendly Navigation:
- To keep users engaged, we needed to develop an intuitive navigation and filtering system that enabled quick searches, helping users easily find deals that matched their interests.
Solution
Adaptive UI Design for Different Sectors:
- Created adaptable UI elements that worked across categories, ensuring consistency and familiarity in user interactions while accommodating sector-specific information.
- Designed individual category pages with dedicated filtering options and visuals to highlight sector-specific deals, allowing a streamlined experience for different types of users.
Optimized Infrastructure for Scalability:
- Built the platform on a scalable cloud-based infrastructure with caching, load balancers, and database optimization to handle traffic spikes smoothly.
- Used lazy loading and optimized images, reducing load times and improving page performance, even during high-traffic periods.
Advanced Search and Filtering System:
- Implemented a comprehensive filtering and sorting system to help users quickly find relevant deals. Users could filter by categories, locations, deal types, or popularity.
- Added an intuitive “Deals Near Me” feature using geolocation, making it easier for users to discover nearby offers and driving in-store footfall.
Results
- Enhanced Business Visibility and Revenue Growth:Deal Street was able to provide a high-traffic platform for various businesses, resulting in improved brand exposure and potential revenue growth for its members.
- High User Engagement and Retention: With the intuitive design and efficient navigation, user engagement rates increased, as evidenced by extended session times and lower bounce rates. The “Deals Near Me” feature significantly boosted user engagement by allowing location-specific searches.
- Reliable Performance Under Heavy Load: Post-launch performance metrics demonstrated the platform’s ability to handle thousands of concurrent users smoothly, with no significant slowdowns or downtime reported.
- Positive User Feedback: Feedback from both users and businesses was overwhelmingly positive, with users noting the ease of finding deals and businesses appreciating the platform’s capacity to bring them more visibility.
The successful launch of Deal Street’s website positioned it as a go-to platform in New Zealand for businesses looking to expand their customer base and increase revenue. By combining a user-focused design with strong technical infrastructure, Deal Street now provides a stable, scalable platform that effectively connects businesses with their target audience. Our design, development, QA, and launch approach enabled Deal Street to fulfill its mission, giving businesses of all sizes an opportunity to reach new customers for free.
Get in touch! Lets build and scale your digital products. We are always open to discuss new projects, creative ideas or opportunities to be part of your vision.
