.gif)
The Capital Markets Live website updates daily with premium investment research for a worldwide audience of Hedge Fund Investors, accessed through a $10,000/year exclusive subscription.
The original website, inherited from an acquisition, lacked critical features and functionality. I was brought in as the Design and UX Lead to create a responsive visual design based on client, stakeholder, and user feedback, leading the visual design and an internal design team, ultimately handing off the design to an external development team.
The first step was to set up meetings with the key stakeholders where they outlined their key pain points about the current site and provided more context on the business, followed by scheduling and conducting interviews with current users who shared their feedback of the current user experience.
After the key issues and challenges were defined, I began applying them to the visual and UX design approach, beginning with identifying and creating the user flows.
Based on research from the Discovery phase, our team identified three primary flows to improve the current experience for both new and registered users: Distribution Channels, Direct Traffic, and Organic Search/SEO.
We also knew that users would need to be able to both register and login seamlessly, a current pain-point. Users also needed to be able to quickly reach out to the author for further information if they were prompted by "interesting" content to spark a conversation.
Additional pages were added to the public website to provide information about the research team, how they work, as well as provide a path to sign-up for a free preview of their content to drive leads or to contact one of the team members.
The current search didn’t behave correctly (or intuitively) and the site navigation contained too much content to be useful. Using the new user flows, I expanded the sitemap to include new pages to help users navigate both the public and logged-in experiences.
A. Latest Articles - Another challenge of the redesign was to organize information from three different international regions into one site. I accomplished this through consolidating the regions into tabs, where the default was to “View All.”
B. Followed Content - The new site allowed users to personalize their content by following specific companies or tags, allowing users to keep an eye on specific industry developments, which would appear on their homepage feed.
C. Trending Topics - To help users identify new trends and developments, I created a “Trending Topics” bar to display the tags from the most frequently visited content.
D. Search & Filters - To make it easier for users to find and track content, I added the ability for users to use various filters to narrow their searches between specific stocks, authors, or a specific timeframe.
Content needed to be filterable for an international audience of users, and allow users to follow relevant content and track the progress of individual companies or topics of interest.
E. Followed Content - Users could choose to “Follow” content through specific tags of interest, allowing them to track trends and news. From the “Following” page, users could view the latest news from their followed tags, or add or remove tags.
F. Profile - From a new "Profile" page, users could now edit their contact and business information, or edit their email subscriptions.
G. Contact - If users were provoked by any “interesting” content, they could reach the content author directly from an article, or from the primary navigation.
The Capital Live Markets website was built and developed, but ultimately never launched after the Capital Markets Live team was dissolved.
I'm an accomplished, multi-faceted creative director and senior designer with in-depth and extensive experience in design ideating, concepting, UI/UX, and digital design.
