anulife has gone through some big transformations over the past two years. Changes such as a new CEO, our mission, our values and what the company prioritizes as important. With those changes, it requires us to adapt the way people experience our products and services.
Manulife.com is a global gateway website that allows customers (both existing and potential), investors, and job seekers to find the information they are looking for. It provides them with information about the company and leads them to the appropriate country website for specific products and services.
Throughout the entirety of this project and my time working on it, the following are various initiatives I was running or part of:
I was the primary UX Designer on this project (allocated at 50%) for almost a year while my colleague was out on maternity leave. An additional UX Designer was contributing to collaborate on more challenging areas of the website and global design system.
This project like many others have had a lot of working parts to them. Although in a normal situation you would approach a redesign as a whole, we did not have that luxury due to business requirements, timelines and the different stakeholders involved per section of the site.
For the purpose of walking you through my process, I will be focusing on the Investor Relations section and walking you through the process I took to create a better experience.
The process was much more complex than a "lift and shift" from old to new. We needed to dig our feet deeper into the research while ensuring business objectives and timelines were met.
The first thing I like to do with any project is understand what what work, research and data exists. Secondly, I like to understand all the constraints that also exist. This included any PowerPoints on the website strategy, research on who our users were, ideas on what future state might look like, plans for the next few weeks, pertinent dates I should be aware of, Sketch files, etc.
As previously mentioned, Manulife has a set of new strategic priorities, this project aligns specifically to becoming a digital customer centric. The global website was very out of date, difficult to find the right information, the interface and branding needed improvement and deeper research needed to be conducted to understand truly what information our users were looking for, and taking into consideration legal implications. This was the problem we were solving for this project.
Understanding the users came from a bit of primary and mainly secondary research. Through limited analytic data, competitive analysis, user testing we are able to identify the types of uses that would visit the site.
One of the biggest challenges with Manulife.com was understanding our specific target audience. Firstly, because this site is a gateway, it does not provide any products or services. Secondly, this site is global, so we have many types of users from around the world landing on our site for something specific every day. Due to these challenges, this made it difficult to conduct any primary research with the limited data we had available.
Once we are able to accurately identify what type of user(s) are landing on the page, we would be able to present each user type with the personalized information they are seeking right away.
Additionally, I chose to group the users based on their purpose and behaviour of visiting the site to the following 2 user groups:
Informational users: Users looking to learn more about the company and do not necessarily have any business with us yet. These users could be individuals or groups looking for insurance, someone browsing for a job or someone looking to invest and wants to learn more about us.
Transactional users: individuals who have a purpose when coming to our site to find something specific. Whether that be signing into their account, finding a job posting or looking for the Year in Review PDF.
To approach this task, I took a crawl we had captured using online tools and with the help of our development team to ensure we had an inventory of all the pages within Investor Relations. I then took that crawl and looked at each page to see the type of content that was in there and placed them in a an Excel document that we would use to walk through with the IR team.
The session included my team, marketing, and Investor Relations in one room to do a walk through of the current IR sections. This was vital for us to understand what was a must have, nice to have, or can go.
Since we were able to get through a little more than half done together, the IR team was the able to complete the remainder of the audit on their own. This approach allowed for greater efficiency to get this task done.
Lastly, there were sections in IR that had a subset of other teams. An example would be for the Shareholder Services section, therefore I had to complete this exercise with them separately.
As you may notice above, we required more detail from the IR team other than what content would stay or go. They would provide us with how much of the data would need to stay (if applicable) and sometimes reference examples from competitors that they thought were desirable for us to use as reference.
Once the data was clean and we were certain what should and should not be included going forward, I conducted a competitive and comparative analysis with other companies within and outside the industry. Examples I looked into were Sun Life, Apple, Shopify, etc. Some of the examples were provided by the IR team themselves and others I took liberty of researching to ensure we are not only looking at competitors, but other disruptors across industries.
Once we had a good understanding of how leading companies were presenting their information today, I was able to complete an IA exercise. As a result, I completed a site map to show how the sections would work together and be split up. Once the initial site map was created, I reviewed this with both my team and the IR team to iterate until it satisfied our requirements.
Finally we were able to design. My colleague and I split the amount of work for the redesign and began illustrating how all the work we have completed to date would come together.
After the first round of designs we made sure to test them through remote user testing with potential users in the demographic we thought would be viewing the material. Once we received that feedback we reviewed the wireframes with the relevant stakeholders to gain their feedback.
After a few small iterations, we had our final designs ready. Below are a few screens to showcase the new design.
However, as our developers began implementing the design, there were issues we encountered. If you recall from earlier, not everything available in the design system would be readily available in AEM for development. This posed a few challenges and questions:
As a result, my colleague and I had to redesign a few screens as the components in AEM would not be readily available prior to launching the Investor Relations section. Nor would our team be able to develop the components due to limited resourcing.
The screen below will show you the two main components that required revision. First, the stock chart that was calling information from a third party and could not be redesigned due to technical constraints. Second, the CTA's could not be in form format, required it to be a link instead that would open the users email.
The client (Investor Relations team), the Marketing team and Executives were very pleased with the outcome of this section. We were successfully able to design something that fit the business timing and needs, while ensuring information was easy to find and read and validated this though user testing.
Without primary research, you are limited to how much empathy and understanding you can have in order to design effectively
Identifying KPIs and having constant user feedback is vital to enhancing the experience
Technical capabilities and business requirements are just as important as user needs
A team that is just as motivated as you are is important to the overall success of the project, especially when working with many constraints
Communication with key stakeholders is always valuable and keeping them included can only help buy in and ensure the outcome is most desirable by both internal stakeholders and users
Having limited components to design with really helps you think outside the box, but it is good to know these constraints prior to designing
Having a well thought out product strategy is key, especially when pivots happen and you are working on a product piece by piece
Taking a deeper dive into the world of Procurement by holistically looking at the end-to-end global journey through processes, stakeholders, touchpoints, policies and more.
Read MoreIf you’re curious to learn more or just want to connect, drop me a line—I promise to respond faster than you can say ‘Design thinking!’
Contact MeI create experiences that are viable, feasible and desirable by looking at opportunities holistically.
