For the intial ask of this engagement, myself (UX designer/Product Designer) and two other team members (Product Owner and Developer) were tasked with seemingly basic website redesign aimed at providing a more modern experience for website visitors of the nation's largest public finance offical membership organization. The primary ask was to complete a website redesign that better reflected and fostered the resource, educator, facilitator, advocate role that the client occupied in the financial industry. Our goal was to bring visually and experientially translate these pillars into a seamless digital experience that best reflected the same authority that the client occupied. Our task - How do we make a tool that best reflects a streamlined website experience, promotes member benefits, and cements our client as the leading experts in the public finance profession?

Our Analysis

Throughout the course of our project, we solidified the initial building blocks of the new site experience by completing interviews with users and stakeholders, while simultaneously conducting a site audit to best understand the existing content. We synthesized the needs of the users and the asks of the stakeholders and ultimately found that our member users most certainly viewed our clients as an industry leader and came to the website for information. However, finding that information on the site as it currently sat was a large task. Due to the confusing and saturated nature of text-heavy content on the site, it was easy to get lost or stuck down rabbit-holes of information that were hard to traverse. Thus users’ had either memorized very specific pathways to find information (rarely deviating from that path, hindering discoverability of new resources) or simply resorting to using the somewhat ineffective search bar. This difficulty navigating the site was clouding the stakeholders’ ability to serve up new content, let alone facilitate member to member networking etc.

While it was clear that the basics user experience framework of the site needed to be addressed (as a solid framework) we also heard a want for peer-peer networking and more accessible access to sharing resources. Noting both the primary and secondary needs of users, we were able to move forward with a solid experience framework that would best drive engagement and member retention.

The Conclusion

The output of our research, recommendations, and design work was an intuitive website that at its core, delivered a much more intuitive website experience - users could better find information through multiple navigation pathways, while suggested or related content allowed them to cross-traverse the site to new information easily. In other words, we did away with the "fall down a rabbithole" experience of the old site and provided Alice a way to more easily find information. We also focused on diversifying the look of their previously text heavy content by visually relieving cognitive load with photos and visual components. After establishing solid groundwork, we were able to better focus on features that better solidified core offerings and accurately reflected more ancillary user needs. These included features such as a material library and a member community. The end result was a scalable Content Management Experience full of customizable components that our clients could use to scale, grow, and take full ownership of their site.

As of June 2020, we have continued to be in partnership with our clients. The website has successfully launched and we have been able to better scale and adapt user needs and business goals through Google analytics analysis and iterative A/B design testing of components. As of December 2020 the member community has been designed and is currently being built. We’re all eagerly awaiting its much anticipated addition to the site.