Thomson Reuters Financial - VSA Partners
An earlier analysis conducted by VSA Partners unearthed an opportunity to completely rethink the way Financial & Risk (F&R) connected with its audience online — to move from a fragmented, distributed system of sites to a clean and distinct digital brand presence that focused on driving sales through lead generation, and positioning and differentiating F&R by telling a powerful, ownable story.
Launch date: 2013
My role: lead User Experience Architect in charge of designing experience. Working very closely with partner and internal stakeholders, educating and guiding them through the design process.
Templates and components…
Understanding that this was not going to be a site we were going to maintain moving forward, it became necessary to provide F&R with a design system that they could leverage when updates or additions needed to be made on the site we originally created for them.
UX collaborated with Content Strategy to create and define a set of responsive templates and components.
Each template was designed and built by VSA Partners, with the expectation that the templates could be re-used by partner as needed. The templates came with an intent and a set of standards to follow.
In addition to a template library, a component library was provided to help fill or populate each template. In turn, helping F&R maintain overall consistency throughout their site.
A sample of the template library
A sample of the component library
Site navigation…
A tree test was conducted to validate the initial proposed Information Architecture with no visual distraction. Using the “Treejack” tool, 195 participants helped validate the structure and findability of content.
“Success” is correlated to a correct answer, an answer that was previously identified as correct by VSA and F&R for the purposes of this test.
“Failure” was not to be interpreted as negative, but it was instead to be seen as an opportunity to elevate content elsewhere on the site, including in-page navigation.
Ten tasks that tackled focus areas of the F&R experience were created in collaboration between myself and F&R. All participants were asked to complete all 10 tasks, but tasks were presented at random to all participants.
Below is a view into how results for a single task were presented to the client.
Site navigation tested
This is the Information Architecture tested as part of the tree test conducted for F&R. It drills down 3 levels, and it is what participants had to navigate to find what they believed to be the “correct” answer for each task.
Sample results set
In this example, 78% of participants successfully completed task (whether directly or indirectly). This means that 78% of participants successfully drilled down to correct link via navigation provided. 19% of participants selected the incorrect link (as defined by VSA and F&R), and 3% of participants chose to skip answer.