Columbia Threadneedle Investments
Responsible Investment Blog
Columbia Threadneedle Investments
CLIENT:
UX/UI Designer
Visual Designer
ROLES:
3 Months
PROJECT DURATION:
Overview
Columbia Threadneedle Investments is an american asset management firm headquartered in Boston with offices in 17 countries with 2700+ employees. The company has a ‘responsible ethos’ and they want to continually promote their responsible investment capabilities to their clients.
Problem
The responsible investment team have a vast amount of marketing materials. This content is embedded within various sections of the company website but do not have a dedicated ‘digital home’. The responsible investment team now want to create a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all things responsible to help promote their capabilities.
Solution
I worked within a product team of content writers, UX designers, project managers, developers and subject matter experts (SMEs) to design a new responsive responsible investment blog. The blog featured a variety of content such as articles, videos and webinars. I was tasked with taking lead on all of the user research for the project and designing the user interface of the blog’s homepage.
I used the Design Thinking Process and various ux research methods during this project. This was an iterative rather than sequential process.
Empathise
Research goals
User surveys
One-on-one interviews
Workshop
Define
Competitor analysis
Feature priority matrix
Personas
Ideate
Brainstorming
Sketches
Prototype
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity prototype
Testing
Usability testing
Findings
Results
Empathise
I conducted an interview with key stakeholders to establish the business goals for the blog.
I obtained an outline of the business requirements from the client’s brief and also by facilitating a workshop with key business stakeholders.
The blogs business goals:
To provide readers with comprehensive and up-to-date information about responsible investment knowledge and strategies.
To raise awareness about the importance of investing responsibly by engaging potential customers who may not be familiar with this type of investment option.
To create interesting content that can be shared on social media channels as part of an ongoing marketing strategy
To allow clients to stay ahead of rapidly changing industry trends by continuously monitoring news stories related to responsible investments.
I ran a stakeholder workshop to understand the product strategy and requirements.
The blogs product requirements:
Be an attractive and well-designed website with easy navigation between pages and posts
Meet the needs of users from discovery in UX research
Include a range of articles, videos and webinars
Allow single or multiple author functionality
Ability to favourite articles
Ability to share articles
The blog needs to be responsive
Display reading time on articles
I conducted user interviews to provide me with insight into the way the user thinks and feels.
I conducted one-on-one user interviews with 8 users. Each interview lasted roughly 30 minutes and consisted of detailed questions to the users about their experience of using blogs. A summary of key insights are detailed below.
Key takeaways:
Image choice for articles need to be considered and eye-catching to be more desirable to read
The overall layout of the blog needs to be easy to navigate
40% of participants prefer to save articles to read later, rather than when they first saw it
75% of participants hated blogs that don’t display read times
Problem Statement / HMW framework
How might we create a broad and engaging experience for readers that encourages them to become involved in conversations and topics related to responsible investing?
Define
I carried out a competitor analysis to identify strengths and opportunities through market trends.
I compared other responsible investment blogs and identify trends, strengths, weaknesses I could improve on.
Key takeaways:
Reading times should be prominent on the grid page
All competitors didn’t feature the headshot of the author on their grid page – most likely to save on space
A limited colour scheme is most common, to keep the focus on the posts
I devised a feature priority matrix to balance user value and business effort.
I created a prioritisation matrix to help identify the most important features to include in the first iteration of the blog. This structured and objective approach helped achieve collaborative consensus whilst satisfying the varied needs of the user and business.
I created a core user persona to focus my mind on the user’s goals, needs and behaviours.
Ideate
I sketched out ideas to visualise the blog homepage layout and the design of its content cards.
After generating a series of ideas, I presented them back to the project team to discuss and vote on the strongest concept to develop further into low-fidelity wireframes.
Example of ideas for article cards layout
Example of layout ideas of blog homepage
Prototype
I designed low-fidelity wireframes to refine the structure and layout of the page.
This helped me visualise how the layout would work to scale. I also used the low-fidelity wireframes for usability testing.
Above: Desktop dashboard wireframe
Above: Mobile dashboard wireframe
The final product
High-fidelity interface of responsive desktop and mobile webpage
Brand font and colour palette
I used Columbia Threadneedle Investments existing colour palette and design system, as seen on the brand website for consistency and user familiarity.
Testing
Usability Testing
Several rounds of usability testing were carried out at different stages of the design process, to ensure the ideas and solutions gave users the best possible experience, whist meeting business requirements.
Results
The blog was launched after its remaining pages were designed by other designers in the team and built by the dev team
Average session length on website – 3.5 minutes
Average daily views per blog post in first week after launch – 258
Achieved 90% CSAT score at end of first quarter after launch
Next steps
Promotion of the blog – Development of an email marketing campaign to keep readers informed of new content posted on the blog or news related to their investment strategies.