APCIA

SMBC

ALKU

APCIA, a major trade association representing 60% of the US property casualty insurance market, faced significant technical hurdles with their outdated digital platform. Their core functions—lobbying for their clients on Capitol Hill and delivering daily summaries of regulatory information to members via a web platform—were hindered by inefficiencies. 

Over the past 20 years, their platform had grown in a fragmented manner, leaving them with redundancies, slow onboarding processes, and a dated Oracle database. Parts of the platform weren't mobile responsive, making it cumbersome for users. The need to modernize their infrastructure was clear, but the scale and complexity of the project were daunting.

The modernized platform brought significant improvements. Internally, the content publishing process transformed from slow and cumbersome to streamlined and efficient, allowing employees to easily produce daily content. Externally, the sleek, responsive web application enhanced user engagement, with a more intuitive experience for members. 

The new infrastructure has made APCIA more agile, efficient, and competitive, supporting the organization’s critical mission and providing value to their vast member base.

APCIA partnered with Stellar Elements to begin the transformation. We started by conducting in-depth discovery discussions to align APCIA’s business goals with a long-term digital strategy. Using Agile project management methods, our team created a clear vision supported by a strict roadmap to prevent scope creep while maintaining flexibility.

Together, we redesigned APCIA’s platform, delivering two major components: a personalized, feature-rich web application for users and a custom CMS-style admin dashboard. These applications enabled efficient content management and mobile responsiveness. Seamless collaboration between UX designers, developers, and APCIA’s back-end team ensured that both internal and external needs were met.

Transforming UX for Employees and Users

Santander

Apiture Express

After a series of acquisitions, Santander Bank quickly emerged as one of the largest banking institutions in the U.S. However, rapid growth brought the challenge of integrating diverse teams into a unified corporate culture. With employees scattered across the country, many from different companies, Santander recognized the critical need for a robust, cohesive employee experience (EX) platform accessible from anywhere.

Santander needed a partner to not only build this digital platform for collaboration and community but also to support its long-term growth. The solution needed to evolve over time, scaling with the bank’s changing needs and ensuring employees remained connected and engaged as the company expanded.

The new intranet identified and closed several frustrating 

 in the financial services industry, especially communication and scalability gaps.

Today, Santander’s thousands of U.S.-based employees are connected through a high-performing, user-friendly Intranet that has transformed their internal communications. What was once a crash-prone, frustrating tool is now a seamless, engaging platform that is an integral part of the company’s culture.

Based on our expertise in design, technical development, and project management, Santander partnered with Stellar Elements to craft a comprehensive employee experience platform.

The foundation of the solution was built on extensive research, including in-depth interviews and focus groups, to ensure the platform delivered useful functionality for every user. 

Our ongoing involvement has been key to optimizing the platform. From major company changes to unforeseen challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, Stellar Elements has consistently helped Santander maintain strong internal communications and a sense of community across their workforce.

Redefining EX with one of the nation’s largest banking institutions

santander

Boston Medical Center

Transforming a leading hospital’s digital presence 

Meeting the in-person standard of patient care from a distance

Creating an app that furthers cancer treatment research

Boston Medical Center (BMC) is a leading healthcare provider in the greater Boston area, known for serving a diverse patient population, including marginalized communities, non-English speakers, and Medicaid holders. Despite their success, their website struggled to reflect their story and meet the needs of patients and physicians.

BMC needed to revamp their website to better communicate their mission, improve UX, and streamline content management across 156 departments.

The new website identified and closed a number of 

 endemic in the healthcare industry, in particular CX perception, communication, and expectation gaps. 

The revamped website now better serves both patients and doctors. With improved storytelling, user experience, and content management, BMC is equipped to continue evolving their digital presence as they grow. The tools and processes we've implemented ensure that their website will continue to meet the needs of their diverse audience.

BMC partnered with Stellar Elements to enhance their digital presence. The goal was to effectively convey the medical institution’s unique story. Stellar Elements also redesigned site navigation and user journeys. 

This helped patients and physicians quickly find the information they need. Additionally, the CMS was optimized, making it easier for over 70 content editors to manage and update content.

Villo

Building a trusted relationship

A connected platform to connect native plants and wildlife

Visitor management systems are expensive and often geared toward larger businesses with complicated needs. We wanted to create a system that was simple, streamlined, and more affordable for smaller businesses and organizations.

Our experiences with existing visitor management systems had left us unimpressed. They were often clunky, counterintuitive, and difficult to navigate. This didn’t seem to align with the high demand for these systems or their adoption by companies with resources to support better systems. So, we set out to fill a clear market gap by providing just that: a better visitor management system.

Villo has been adopted as the primary visitor management system by a variety of organizations, including businesses and religious community centers. This new system addresses and closes a frustrating 

Our goal was clear from the start. The system needed to be functional, beautiful, secure, and easy to adopt. It had to track visitors and deliveries in real-time and provide a digital visitor log that could be retrieved easily and quickly.

Our initial use cases focused on safety and accountability—for example, enabling organizations to quickly get a headcount in emergencies or track visitors in case of theft. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent changes in health and safety rules created a strong new demand for visitor management systems. Suddenly, every public-facing organization, from offices to restaurants to schools, needed a way to track every visitor daily.

, our new visitor management system, has been designed to be both beautiful and intuitively functional. From the bright, approachable interface to the customization tools, it allows businesses and organizations to offer visitors a seamless sign-in experience.

Businesses using Villo can customize the sign-in process with their company branding and dynamic visuals. Documents that visitors need to sign or acknowledge can easily be added to the sign-in flow. Beverage options can even be provided, allowing visitors to order coffee or tea as they sign in. Our focus was consistently on ease of use and anticipating users’ needs, embodied in every aspect of Villo.

A better way to greet employees

Goodnature

Creating a seamless digital platform

Saying "I Do" to Innovation

Goodnature revolutionized pest control with their humane automatic rat trap. To go further, they wanted to enhance their system with a digital element to add more value for customers. However, developing this entirely new and complex digital product was outside their expertise.

 solutions for users, especially integration, measurement, and innovation gaps.

Launched with the Goodnature A24 Rat Trap, the Chirp app allows users to monitor and maintain their traps via their phones, engage with the conservation community, and access real-time impact data. The dashboard provides comprehensive data management for larger organizations.

Goodnature teamed up with Stellar Elements to create Chirp, a platform that involved customer-centric design, mobile devices, scalable cloud infrastructure, complex data handling, and IoT beacon integration. After a discovery workshop, we designed an intuitive user experience aimed at simplifying trap setup, making data reporting easy, and creating an engaging user experience.

To make the Chirp traps work seamlessly, we integrated Bluetooth beacons to store kill data, allowing customers to collect metrics via Bluetooth even when offline. We ensured smooth hardware-software integration through rigorous testing, resulting in a reliable app and robust backend.

For organizations using thousands of Chirp traps, we developed a web dashboard to consolidate and manage data across multiple accounts, adding a user hierarchy for shared access. This created an end-to-end product that served both individual customers and large organizations.

A connected platform to protect native plants and wildlife

Helping entrepreneurs get down to business

Innovating faster with a better banking solution

Global financial leader SMBC was suffering from a fragmented digital experience wrought with legacy websites, outdated content, and a platform that hindered seamless integration across their business sectors while meeting strict regulatory standards.

To stay competitive, attract top talent, and resonate with their employees and target audiences, SMBC partnered with Stellar Elements to create a new brand direction and website.

As part of these initiatives, we established the brand vision, values, and standards throughout their entire brand ecosystem, shaping a cohesive identity and guiding how SMBC communicates internally and externally through a responsive web experience.

Our core design principle was to foster clarity and focus, resulting in simplification of SMBC's production processes: the new design, reduction of unnecessary page templates, and a revised brand style guide transformed a previously chaotic process into a streamlined and simplified approach for updating site content.

This solution targeted and closed a number of 

, including integration and CX perception gaps.

Informed by research, interviews, and our brand audits, we helped SMBC create a design foundation that spanned their global brand, core industries, employee communications, and recruiting campaigns.

With this work, a new and elevated brand expression for SMBC emerged focused on clarity and strong design. We delivered an in-depth style guide, which spoke to core design elements across the brand: voice and tone, photography, typography, and color palette.

Aligning with our previous redesign efforts, SMBC sought to unify their web presence by consolidating eight websites for different business units into one cohesive website. We redesigned and unified the SMBC Americas website, implementing a new site structure and UX/UI improvements, with a new branded look, voice, and tone. This resulted in a reimagined, fully responsive web experience.

Elevating a brand's perception in the financial market

Westpac

Securing contactless payments for Android customers

Reaching emerging markets

Westpac is one of the biggest banks in New Zealand. When they wanted to offer their customers a seamless, contactless payment experience on their Android devices, they asked us to collaborate. However, building a mobile wallet for payments with contactless terminals is a technically complex undertaking. Here’s what we did. 

The app went live in Google Play, quickly earning positive reviews from users. Westpac team members who regularly use Android Pay and Apple Pay report that they prefer the look of Westpac Pay, and find the experience more interactive.

The new app identified and closed several 

 in financial services, in particular the service and trust gaps. 

We needed to understand how our solution was going to work within the existing payments landscape in New Zealand, with all its different banks, merchant terminals, and the technical infrastructure in between.

Along with Westpac, we partnered with Mastercard, who provided us with in-depth technical documentation. This gave us a starting point to build on through discussions with Mastercard and Westpac teams. A series of product workshops helped us define the complete user journey, including the services, technical systems, and integrations that would be involved. 

This eventually led us to a proposed technical solution: a Westpac branded Android app using the Mastercard SDK, connected to Westpac for user authentication and payment transactions. Development was split into two key areas: the Mastercard SDK and front-end. Understanding the Mastercard SDK was critical to working with Westpac while developing backend APIs.

We knew the experience had to feel secure, be simple to use and meet the technical requirements needed for approval by Westpac and Mastercard. We were also well aware that when building a payments product, there is no room for error and security is a key priority. So we designed 3 levels of security that customers could choose from, allowed them to select and add multiple cards at once, and created a full-screen UI takeover during the payment process providing real-time status of the payment or errors.

Westpac Pay

Backr

Putting data to work

Small businesses are often considered the backbone of any economy. However, starting a new business can be a challenging and complicated process, even in countries with a well-structured regulatory environment. The barriers to entry remain fairly high.

X15 Ventures set out to support aspiring entrepreneurs and make the process easier by creating a digital platform to cater to their needs.

Backr launched in September 2020. The launch campaign garnered widespread media attention and facilitated new business registrations within the first month.

The platform achieved so much initial success because we were able to work with X15 Ventures to identify and avoid 

In partnership with X15 Ventures and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, we designed and built Backr, a platform to simplify and streamline the process of setting up a business in Australia. Here’s how our teams worked together.

During the discovery phase, we mapped out relevant user personas for a deeper understanding of the platform’s end users. Our user research showed that many would-be entrepreneurs are confident in their skills but struggle with other business issues, like regulations and operations.

To make sure Backr was a useful digital product for the target users, we worked with X15 Ventures to create a user journey covering every essential step—from registering a business name to creating an invoice template.

Branding is just as important as functionality for new digital products. So we worked with X15 to develop the Backr brand, establishing rules and guidelines for not only the visual design but also the tone of voice and brand personality.

During the delivery phase, we provided API architecture and backend services supporting the frontend applications. We also set up, configured, and maintained the cloud infrastructure for both backend and frontend applications. Additionally, we collaborated with the X15 Ventures team to integrate Backr with government agencies and various third-party services.

Our quality assurance team conducted QA testing across the entire platform and implemented automation tools and processes for scaling the product. In the launch phase, we managed deployments and all necessary preparations, including test accounts, beta distribution, and final deployments.

Generation Tux

Subaru

Woodford Reserve

When celebrity businessman George Zimmer decided to reboot his career, he took aim the men’s formal wear rental business. He believed the industry was ripe for disruption.

But at the time, digital solutions were limited and had poor user experiences. Zimmer needed help bringing his vision for a high-touch clothing rental experience online. 

The new brand and easy-to-use ecommerce website targeted and closed many 

The end result is a brand that meets and exceeds the customer’s needs and continues to make one aspect of weddings much less stressful.

Zimmer came to Stellar Elements with little more than a legal pad full of ideas and the resources to make them real. He enlisted the team to design critical aspects of the new business.

Looking at the problem from the inside out, Stellar Elements crafted and delivered a complete customer experience. This included the feel of the brand, as well as the process flows that informed the tech and fulfillment teams to imagine the total experience differently.

Tesla

Bringing the showroom to the living room

Subaru 

There was a time when an all-electric luxury sedan seemed like a risky proposition for consumers. Tesla changed that, but it required an innovative approach.

Faced with the challenge of changing drivers’ perceptions, Tesla carefully developed its showroom experience to help consumers overcome their objections to an all-electric car. The only problem was that not everyone lived near a Tesla dealership.

The GoElectric digital product targets and closes 

Along with at one time being the second most visited page on Tesla’s website, GoElectric became an incredible source of leads to the Model-S sedan.

By easing customers into the experience, and letting them play with interactive tools that both enlighten and excite, reservations about the purchase turned into reservations for a purchase.  

Tesla looked to Stellar Elements to help bring their showroom experience to life in potential customers’ living room. 

Working collaboratively with an eye toward the technology adoption curve, the Stellar Elements UX and design teams developed an approach to the problem that transformed product confusion and objections into opportunities for education and inspiration.

The solution was the GoElectric digital experience. The award-winning interactive feature on Tesla’s website addresses common questions and allows users to explore the technology.  

Tesla GoElectric Experience

PayPal

Les Mills 

Damon Motors

PayPal is one of the most recognizable and utilized financial technology companies in the world. Their  digital wallet global payments applications serve consumers and merchants around the world. However, PayPal was facing several challenges: 

This new digital product closed a number of 

, including integration, innovation, and service. 

By leveraging a single code base, Stellar Elements were able to deliver the PayPal app for the Amazon Fire tablet in two weeks and deploy variants quickly. This also enabled Stellar Elemnts to ensure the project was cost-efficient, easily maintainable, and scalable for continued growth across the varied platforms.  

PayPal approached Stellar Elements to design and build a tablet application for the Amazon Fire tablet—the company's first-ever tablet application. 

By reusing the existing Android code base, Stellar Elements was able to push the app to multiple Android variants, including Amazon at reduced costs. 

Bringing PayPal to emerging markets

PayPal App Development

Manulife Investment Management

Automating a complex land leasing process

Les Mills

Yes Networks

Manulife Investment Management links license managers with landowners who have lessees wanting to buy or rent property. But they were facing growing challenges with their offline procedures. 

Limited online information and a cumbersome manual process with paperwork and phone calls was hampering business and customer perception. Manulife needed a digital process that would remove administrative burdens and streamline land parcel leasing for customers.

The previous experience had considerable customer experience gaps in perception, service, scalability, and process. Identifying and closing these acute 

 powered the new system’s design and functionality.

The solution resolved bottlenecks and headaches in the land parcel leasing process, especially as the company grows across six regional U.S. locations.

Online sales increased immediately following launch, driven by a better user experience that alleviated challenges for customers and the HNRG team.

Manulife partnered with Stellar Elements to modernize their land parcel leasing process. 

For customers, new features were key. They needed an interactive map to view available parcels and a way to buy lease applications online. 

For Manulife, the solution had to grant customers the autonomy over the process so they could manage their investments online.  

Manulife helped Stellar Elements understand the key pain points of the process from the customers’ and its internal team's perspectives. These insights were crucial in guiding the capabilities of the new custom application, which required accessibility and customization across multiple locations.  

Manulife Investment Management Ecommerce Process

MIT UPOP

Enhancing career educational tools

Apiture Xpress

The Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) at MIT excels at helping students pursue the career they want. Along with providing standard services, like resume and interviewing help, students partner with industry leaders who act as mentors.

Increased enrollment and program enhancements were creating problems for the staff. Decades-old technology could not keep up with demands, and an increasing number of tasks had to be handled manually—taking resources away from students.

UPOP technology was no longer meeting the needs of its current and future users: students, staff and mentors. 

UPOP needed a new tool, and they needed it quickly. It was late March, and students would need to start applying to the program in early August.

UPOP’s program management tool makes just about every process more efficient. From helping staff review student applications to monitoring student job search progress, the tool reduces workloads and helps staff shift their attention back to students.

The tool also helps students. Students can use the tool to RSVP to events, track their progress via a dynamic milestone tracker, communicate directly with staff, and submit important documents for review. Industry mentors also use the tool to communicate with students.

While a challenge, the successful completion of the project in such a tight time frame enabled the UPOP community to realize the benefits from day one.

Building for resiliency also means building for growth. As UPOP continues to grow, the program management tool is built to grow alongside them.

UPOP partnered with Stellar Elements to realize this new product with such an aggressive timeline. 

Starting with a few wireframes and a general direction, Stellar Elements and UPOP knew there was only one way to meet the deadline: Kickoff full development on day 1.

Teams worked in parallel, planning, wireframing, and designing alongside development. While engineers built out one feature set, Stellar Elements’ strategists worked closely with UPOP to plan the next one.

The approach worked: define, wireframe, design, build, repeat. By the first week of July, development was complete and the tool was ready to undergo rigorous testing.

For a live launch like the UPOP tool, testing is as important as development. Finishing development in July allowed the tool to undergo a month of rigorous quality assurance to ensure that it was airtight for students.

MIT UPOP Custom Software Development

Harvard University Asia Center

Reflecting a center’s academic value

Salesforce

An outdated website was holding back the Harvard University Asia Center. Researchers around the world depend on the institution for its world-class cross-cultural studies, but the center’s digital presentation didn’t reflect this prestige. The user experience was bad and site management was difficult.

The Harvard University Asia Center and Stellar Elements identified and closed several 

, including opportunities in customer experience perception, integration and service.  

By launching a new website built for today’s usability and growth demands, the site relieves significant administrative burden and accurately reflects the expertise and work of the Harvard Asia Center.

The Harvard University Asia Center partnered with Stellar Elements to find the right platform to serve as the primary source of their content. The new CMS could handle rich content and large amounts of data in a user-friendly manner, while also meeting strict ADA standards for accessibility.

Along with being easy to manage, the redesigned and redeveloped website accomplished several important goals. The center can tell its compelling story across cultures and languages. Information and data about professors, researchers, and grants is readily available. What’s more, the Center’s institute partners can easily replicate the site for separate sub-websites. 

Reflecting a university cultural center’s academic value

ALKU 

Unlocking growth through employee experience

Port of Auckland

US Navy

As a specialized staffing firm, ALKU had developed proprietary methods for the staffing process and had built a uniquely scalable system for employee development. But the reliance of the process on physical presence in an office and analog methods like whiteboards, was a risk to scale.

To facilitate seamless collaboration across locations, ALKU needed to digitize their workflows in a way that stayed true to their culture while making room for continued growth.

ALKU and Stellar Elements identified and closed a number of 

, including opportunities in innovation, service, and scalability.

ALKU's unique culture of collaboration and competition is now possible from anywhere, in real time. This digital solution enabled them to grow and scale at a rapid rate—even during a global pandemic. And they've been able to grow exponentially, take on multiple successful rounds of growth equity, and scale to a national leader in specialized staffing.

Over 5-plus years of partnership, Stellar Elements has worked hand in hand with ALKU's leadership to develop a suite of software to empower their continued growth. In the beginning, we spent time with ALKU employees, understanding how the team used the whiteboards and identifying ways to digitize that made sure nothing was lost, but much was gained.

Watching how ALKU employees worked enabled us to design and engineer a tool that felt natural to ALKU's employees, so much so that it became the backbone of their company and process. The first tool that was built, ALKU Everywhere, is the central hub for all of ALKU's revenue generating activities, and is a staple on all employee computers, as well as on 20-plus large touchscreen TVs located throughout ALKU's offices nationally.

Building upon that success, we have designed and delivered a number of other mission critical software tools for ALKU's team. Together, we've delivered call list generating software that has saved thousands of hours of manual work. And we've created performance management and reporting tools that help managers unlock new performance from their teams and empower their staff to reach their growth goals.

ALKU is a company that believes deeply in employee development. They are now a 500-plus person company, and their current president started as their first intern.

Unlocking scale through EX technology

Tim Hortons

Brigham and Women's Hospital

Firefly Health

A Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon received a grant to study the potential impact a lifestyle app could have on treatment outcomes for cancer patients—but needed help developing the smartphone technology.

The app would need to track patients’ lifecycles such as diet and exercise as they underwent cancer treatment. In turn, the app needed to be able to share data directly with medical teams so they could understand and monitor the impact on their patients.

The new digital product helped identify and close 

 in personalization, feedback and measurement. 

The medical team holding the grant was able to prove the effectiveness of the well-built, next-generation custom healthcare application to conduct important cancer research via patient feedback—with patients rating the app as understandable and easy to use with an overall satisfaction score of 

This important oncology research was made possible by the partnership between Brigham and Women's Hospital and Stellar Elements and their shared commitment to patient outcomes. 

Enabling data-driven insights to inform the hospital’s study on patient cancer treatment outcomes was the cornerstone of this effort.

Stellar Elements architected a mobile app that securely houses patient data and provides an intuitive, content-based data collection capability with a patient-friendly user interface that makes data input easy.

Creating a tap-and-pay closed-loop mobile wallet

YES Networks

Tim Hortons is a top 50 quick-service restaurant (QSR) with more than 4000 locations across North America. The brand approached Stellar Elements to help create a mobile payment solution to reduce customer queueing times. The solution needed to leverage its existing infrastructure including point-of-sale (POS) and two different payment processors.

loses experience gaps in service, consistency, and innovation

TimmyMe was the world’s first HCE-enabled closed-loop mobile wallet. This gave Tim Hortons a competitive edge, establishing the company as an innovative leader in the QSR space. The app quickly proved successful in the market:

Tim Hortons and Stellar Elements partnered to deliver a mobile application with payment functionality using a proprietary mobile payment software development kit (SDK). The kit was leveraged to build secure barcode mobile wallet solution–the first of its kind in the world.

In less technical terms, this application can be likened to Apple Pay before Apple Pay even existed.

Creating the world’s first tap-and-pay closed-loop mobile wallet

Salesforce builds bridges between companies and customers. The company is a massive, global ecosystem of diverse teams, products, and services. To maintain the needs of their constant evolution, Salesforce requires the help of a partner who both knows their brand inside and out and can also be trusted with critical brand marketing launches for their core products, industries, and services.

Being a trusted partner for so long has allowed us to continually identify and close frustrating 

 with the Salesforce digital product, including gaps in CX perception and consistency. 

Since 2014, Stellar Elements has been a trusted partner in the expression of the Salesforce brand experience. We've designed brand marketing for Salesforce, Slack, Tableau and MuleSoft, and collaborated on a wide range of projects from brand creative to future-forward initiatives.

For over 20 years, Stellar Elements has helped industry leaders solve the persistent problems that stand in the way of their potential.

Insights

Updates

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