Case Study
A New Platform for a Dying Industry
Directing a team of seven to deliver a design system and marketing platform that increased web-generated lead production by 177%
Role: Lead Strategist & Experience Director
Client: Dignity Memorial (SCI)
Industry: Deathcare Services
Duration: 15 months
Team: 7 (UX, design, strategy, front-end development)
The Problem
SCI, the largest deathcare services company in North America, needed to build a digital marketing capability from scratch. Their existing platform — built on Documentum — was slow to update, nearly impossible to use for launching new content, and left zero room for experimentation. They needed 1,300 unique funeral home websites, one per location, in three languages. And they had a brand that didn't translate to digital.
But the technology was only part of the challenge. Three competing forces made this project genuinely difficult:
Grieving customers needed a digital experience built around kindness, clarity, and immediacy — someone whose loved one just died doesn't have patience for bad UX.
An inexperienced marketing team needed a platform simple enough to onboard quickly but sophisticated enough to grow into as their capabilities matured.
Thousands of traditional, conservative funeral directors across the country needed to trust that the new platform would make their jobs easier, not harder. Any solution that didn't earn buy-in from the frontline would fail regardless of how good the design was.
My Approach
I led the strategic work that aligned marketing, IT, and business stakeholders around a shared vision before the design work started. That alignment was the foundation everything else depended on.
I ran design thinking workshops, conducted task analysis, and led user interviews to map how customers, marketing staff, and funeral directors each interacted with digital touchpoints. The research revealed that the platform needed to serve three fundamentally different mental models — not just one "user." That insight shaped every architectural decision that followed.
From there, I directed the team through personas, user journeys, wireframes, and clickable prototypes — iterating through concept testing, usability testing, and accessibility testing at each stage. I made a deliberate call to frame the initial release as a Minimum Lovable Product: functional enough to replace the legacy system, polished enough to earn trust from skeptical funeral directors, and flexible enough that the marketing team could evolve their practices without rebuilding the platform.
Key Decisions
Component-driven design system over page-based templates. Instead of designing fixed page layouts, I directed the creation of a component library that let the marketing team assemble and edit screens rapidly. This was critical because SCI's team was small and new — they needed to support 1,300 sites without a 1,300-site workflow. The component approach also meant the team could experiment with new content and layouts without engineering support.
Platform architecture that grew with the team. I architected the platform strategy to match the marketing team's current capability while building a clear path toward more advanced practices. The roadmap wasn't just a feature list — it was a maturity model that sequenced capability growth over time.
Personalization and search optimized for the customer's journey. Each location page was personalized by geography, services, and local traditions — because deathcare is deeply local and cultural. I specified dynamic landing pages (thousands of them, generated programmatically) to support just-in-time search marketing with content override capability. The search strategy optimized for the customer journey, not just keywords. Sitecore forms integrated with Salesforce and Pardot to feed lead nurture programs.
Accessibility as a design constraint, not a checkbox. WCAG AA and Section 508 compliance were built into the design system, the components, and the content management workflows — not retrofitted after launch. Mobile-first responsive design ensured that when someone's loved one died, they could get help regardless of device.
Outcomes
The project recouped its entire cost within the first year.
177% increase in web-generated lead production
29% improvement in web leads (against a target of 22%)
1,300+ unique location sites launched in three languages
20% traffic growth in year one
14% rise in affiliate sales in year one; 15% in year two
+38 Net Promoter Score from a baseline of +10
89% quarter-over-quarter growth in organic traffic
104% quarter-over-quarter growth in social traffic
Top 3 search results in 93% of local markets for target keywords
Sitecore Experience Award, Honorable Mention for Best Business Impact/ROI
Reflection
My primary contribution wasn't any single deliverable — it was creating trust across three groups with fundamentally different needs. The marketing team needed simplicity. The funeral directors needed reassurance. Leadership needed growth metrics. The strategy worked because I forced alignment on shared principles before anyone debated features. The "social flywheel" I designed for content sharing drove the organic and social traffic numbers, but the real lesson was that a platform strategy is only as good as the organizational alignment behind it. If I ran this again, I'd formalize the capability maturity model earlier and tie platform releases explicitly to the team's skill progression.