We started the project with a workshop on site with the client to identify all of the personas they wanted to serve content to and to prioritise these. We then planned functional user journeys for each persona that could then inform a site map and functional structure for the portal. We then discussed creative approaches and identified best practices and things to avoid within the workplace. Finally we identified the non-functional requirements for the audience, which included legacy browsers as many large organisation in the financial sector operate on very old versions.
Following the workshop we wireframed the website to create offline user journeys that we could assess with the client to make sure they did what was required. We used these to link together the areas of the site and identify content on each screen that would need to dynamically link to other content. This in turn informed the data architecture that would be required to facilitate all the filtering and the creation of dynamic tables (which would be based on matching tags in the CMS).
Once the offline approach was agreed we developed a working data model in the CMS and at the same time produced graphical designs for all the key screens. Part of this was taking the very rudimentary branding that existing and extrapolating this out into a full digital brand.
The development team then created the full working pages for the site along with a registration and login process and the associated management screens for this. Functionality to allow users to create ‘favourites’ lists of funds was also added in, along with categorised new, articles and blogs sections.
After go live we have subsequently developed data feeds from the CMS to 3rd party sites and undertaken a continual programme of small iterative enhancements to expand on the initial functionality.
