Bestinvest
Conversion (and colour) focussed redesign of leading investment platform
Services
Information Architecture, Interactive Prototyping, Responsive Design, Stakeholder Research, Usability Testing, User Experience Design, User Research, Visual Design, Wireframing.
Duration
6 months
Bestinvest has had several design refreshes in recent years but this was the first full redesign in over 5 years.
The marketing website had several hundred pages of content split across its major product and service areas, encompassing both marketing led, promotional pages as well as informative, educational content.
Redesigning the investment platform was also a key priority for Bestinvest with the creation of a mobile app essential to meet user expectations and business needs.
Bestinvest app
We were tasked with creating a full prototype of the app that could be showcased to key stakeholders and tested to ensure product/market fit.
The app had to fulfill its’ core functions of allowing Bestinvest clients to view and manage their investments as well incorporating a number of features to aid their investing such as an investment coach, personal wealth tracker and tailored content to their investment interests.
We rapidly created a number of different options, wireframing screens before internal testing and the creation of hi-fidelity prototypes.
Marketing website redesign
At the heart of the website redesign challenge was how to accommodate the several different types of visitors to the website – from a range of demographics and with differing goals – into a coherent user experience.
Of course, business goals were a key consideration but it was the diversity of content a long with it’s audience that become the main challenge for the Vector and Bestinvest combined team.
Approach
Research & planning
This project had been several years in the planning but our input was required to determine how best to translate the broad UX requirements into a fully functioning multi-faceted website. Co-location meant that not only could we hold more formal sessions with key stakeholders in order to tease out the detailed requirements and goals but also to hold very valuable informal ad hoc meetings to review decisions as we went a long. At Vector’s request a number of briefing documents were created by the Bestinvest team that included both user and business goals so that the design team could get a full understanding of the context of each and every screen they were designing.
Prototyping
A slightly different approach was taken with prototyping as we went from low-fidelity wireframes straight to high-fidelity design and utilised the Marvel prototyping app to create interactive mockups – giving as close to realistic view of the user journey without a full build – for review by key stakeholders.
Visual design
With the large amount of content to consider and with some highly functional areas as well as more informative sections – the visual design sought to use colour and form to effectively differentiate areas of the website and key sections of the page templates. An overall colour palette with differing colour schemes for each section was created with the aim of giving major service and content areas such as Pensions and ISAs their own identity within the website. Conversion centred landing page formats were employed for account and product pages as well as card layouts for larger content areas such as News and Research to allow for easy browsing and filtering.
Results
The website launched in January 2017 and immediately saw a spike in key metrics such as guide downloads, account transfers and overall visitor numbers. The success has led to the green light being given to the redesign of the investment platform itself, due for launch late 2017.
We loved working with Vector. Rebranding our small business was a huge undertaking: high risk, high emotion but they guided us through with empathy, expertise, patience and creativity. We're so happy with the finished product.”
Jonathan Bull
CEO, EmailOctopusWe thoroughly enjoyed working with Vector. Sanjay and his team understood our brief and business and designed a gorgeous website that has exceeded our expectations”
Peter Spring
Director of Learning and Development, City AcademyWe really enjoyed working with the Vector team - their process quickly established the goals and requirements of the project before they worked within our existing brand to deliver a fantastic refresh of Canopy's marketing website.”
Vina Mistry
Marketing Manager, CanopyVector's talented design team immediately got what we were trying to convey with our brand and were able to collaborate with our own team to successfully produce a fantastic redesign of our visual identity and website.”
Jonny White
Founder & CEO, Ticket TailorPartnering with Vector has been pure joy. Together we've been able to rapidly introduce and revamp critically important content and customer experience elements of the MeasureMatch website and marketplace platform. We’re looking forward to working with Sanjay and his team many times more in the days ahead.”
