Building
on Empathy
Rebuilding a global B2B product from the ground-up based upon research, empathy, and understanding
Project Brief
Client
Wunderman Thompson
Role
UX Lead
Industry
Global B2B Financial Investments
Project Description
Working closely with Content Strategists and Experience Designers to define the overall strategy and vision to deliver a digital experience that builds brand creditability, inspires engagement, and drives users to act.
Where We Started
The client is a well-known global investment leader who wanted to consolidate multiple global websites into 1 main site. As the Lead UX Designer I was tasked with advocating for the end-user by utilizing creative problem solving methods to not only humanize the product, but also confirm that the user experience was based upon research , understanding, and aligned with the business and brand needs.
Collaborative Approach
Conducting a heuristic evaluation and full content audits of all websites websites allowed the team to focus on the information being presented, and cross-linked throughout the current experience.
Current State IA Audit
Mapping the current IA across all sites provided a best use case for displaying data by pointing out patterns helpful with evaluating content by discovering similarities and differences.
This exercise provided valuable insight by highlighting content hirearchy and page taxonomy.
Personas & Journey Maps
Partnering with the Experience and Strategy teams - we built research-based Personas to not only gain deep insights into the customer base, but also to understand expectations, concerns, and motivations.
The personas were used as a design tool to help visualize who we were designing for and based upon our research, what their needs were, and ultimately - how we might win them over.
We created 3 Personas for the current customer profiles so that we could design the experience around who was actively using the website.
Yo!
Customer Journey Maps
Mapping our personas provided us with early empathy and an understanding of what the customer experiences. This now only provided insight, but also allowed the teams to focus on key moments and areas within the journey where we could invest extra time for ideation, innovation, and ultimately providing an ideal customer experience.
Card Sort Findings
Read about 2021 investment themes
Mutual Fund Performance
Exchange Traded Fund Prices
Special Tax-Sheltered Retirement Plans
Watch Highlights from the Sustainable Business Summit
Cards
Investment Vehicles
Mutual Funds
2 Items
Equities Asset Class
Category
Hybrid Card Sort
The Content Strategists constructed the Information Architecture based on their research and understanding. We conducted a hybrid card sorting exercise to compare our assumptions with financial professionals in various roles to learn how they understand and categorize content and prove if unique user groups think differently about information. We selected a hybrid card sort because we were confident in our Information Architecture from our research. However, we still wanted to allow participants to have the ability to change the category names if they desired.
The card sort results ultimately did validate our overall assumptions on the IA, but we still found opportunities to create relevant cross-linking from other pages of the site to improve findability. Armed with qualitative and quantitative data we then incorporated our research findings into the Information Architecture diagrams.
Future State User Journeys
Using the personas we mapped our users through multiple high-level experiences to better visualize steps and user priorities. Working closely with the Experience Designers we highlighted the many User Interface touchpoints to gain early insights to help visualize the user journey and prioritize component design.
In Conclusion
The path to success is smoothly paved by the time and effort spent better understanding and defining who we're designing for. It's a long and tedious process, but well worth the effort.
The designs and steps we made were completed in order to define and ask the right questions to the right people which in turn enlightened the entire team with vast amounts of insight based upon many weeks and months of intense research, interviews, and revisions. The work we did not only validated a process, but it also, and I quote, "Overall (these UX Designs) are friggin' great — you truly helped me in understanding and navigating steps forward/priorities. Thanks again for your hard work."