A User Experience Designer and Freelance Design Consultant.
CASE STUDY:
Home Page & Channel Selector
Project: Rebrand Web Page & Update Content Modules
Project Duration: 2019 - 2020
Company: Janus Henderson Investors
My Role: UX Designer
WHAT I DID
My work helped contribute to the rebrand of the home page and channel selector designs and functionality. Designed and implemented new digital brand guidelines. Collaborated to gather internal and external user research data, designed mockups and partnered with development team to provide functionality requirements.
THE LOWDOWN
Background
In 2017, Janus Capital Group and Henderson Investors merged. As with any merger, branding conversations started to take place. What is the brand today and what should it be tomorrow? While these branding conversations were underway, me and the digital/development teams took the time look at how each company structured and built their website. It took two years to revamp and set new standards around the new global web platform. The goal was to get a website that could share content globally and make it so that the digital content managers could maintain the sites equally. Before we could talk new design, we needed to solve things such as language translations, compliance restrictions per country, how to broadcast content on the different sites (hub and spoke model), etc.
The Problem
Now that the global web platform had been built, the visual design quickly became outdated. Not only was the visual design needing some love, but the management of content on all the different channels and countries were becoming out of sync. There was a need to find a better way to display and share content on all the home pages.
Research
Competitor Analysis – I researched 18 competitors. I looked at design visuals, layout, content, functionality, etc. This information gave us insight into industry standards, as well as get inspiration.
User Feedback – I helped create survey questions that were to be asked to our clients to better understand what was working and what wasn’t within our website. We needed to understand what components/content were essential to their website visit. User feedback gave us critical insight to how they moved around on the page, and further interacted with the website.
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Stakeholder Feedback – I helped create a survey for our internal stakeholders. We wanted to gain insight as to how they use our site, promote our site and understand what they would like improved, whether it was design or functionality requests. This feedback was crucial to creating a list of key takeaways.
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Site Analytics – I collaborated with our SEO team to gain insight into what existing statistics were on our site. We looked at Exit Rates, Heat Maps, Interaction Clicks, Domain Site Speeds, Quality Score for Mobile, etc. We were able to pinpoint problems and it gave us ideas on how we needed to improve.
Design Exploration
For this phase, my teammate and I collaborated on design ideas. We created an information architecture for the page so we could understand what content was needed and then designed from there. We focused on trying to solve all the pain points that were discovered during our research. I brought in our development team during this exploration. It was imperative to get them included early so we could collaborate on how to best design the functionality and tap into their knowledge.
Design Guidelines
During the design exploration process, I started developing the new Brand Guidelines. (i.e. font styles, button styles, table design, color usage, icons, etc). We were going to need structure to our designs once we started flushing out prototypes.
Prototyping
My teammate and I each worked on separate modules to the page. We shared frequently with each other, stakeholders and established users. This helped reduce iterations tremendously. Once modules got (almost) finalized, I laid them into a full-page mockup. This allowed us to design out any further details we needed. I helped write in-depth functionality descriptions for our development team to help aid them in the build.
CONCLUSION
The combination of research, design exploration, style guides, prototyping, and development insight made for the perfect UX ‘recipe’. The Home page and Channel Page project was met with rave reviews from leadership, stakeholders and clients.
