Background

Emotomy is a unique and multi-faceted fintech tool designed for different types of financial advisor audiences. After being acquired by Northern Trust's Asset Management business unit, the business wanted to redesign the public-facing marketing website for the tool to optimize the focus around lead-gen, and encouraging users to sign-up for a demo of the product.

Project Goals:

• Serve as Visual Design Lead, establishing a comprehensive re-brand of the Emotomy product and creating new visual designs for each page and component of the new website
• Evolve the current (sparse) branding materials to align with the Northern Trust brand
• Create and provide detailed UI designs and specs to hand-off to development team

Approach

1. Discovery

Working with the UX lead, we began the project by conducting a competitive analysis of other industry product websites for inspiration, as well as conducting a heuristic of the current site to determine key improvements and create recommended approaches to information architecture and overall site content.

‍

2. Ideation

Driven by the data gathered in the Discovery phase, I began creating the wireframe designs for the site. The homepage layout was designed around two goals: Providing a brief overview of the product suite, as well as driving users towards a lead-gen form to sign up for a product demo. Interior pages highlighted key features using contextual device screens which reflected the flexibility of the web-based apps working across multiple screens.

3. Branding & Styleguide

Following approval of the wireframe prototype, I moved on to creating the styleguide and visual vocabulary for the brand. The goal was to extend the currently available (and very basic) brand elements to marry with elements of the Northern Trust brand. To accomplish this, I pulled in complementary blue accent shades from the Northern Trust color palette, and established a design theme around an ownable circular element, repeated across backgrounds and iconography and reflected in rounded-corner buttons and curved accents.

I also explored multiple approaches to the homepage hero section, including several abstract illustrated background designs, which later evolved into hero backgrounds for the interior sections.

4. Visual Design

Once the branding and theming had been established, I moved on to applying the theme to the wireframes and adding the visual designs for all the site page templates, including desktop and mobile.

Outcome

Since launch the new Emotomy website, engagement increased drastically, with 42% more pageviews than the previous period and a 217% increase in total site visitors, along with an 3% increase of the average time on page.

Lessons Learned

• Emotomy launched successfully only with direct collaboration with key executive stakeholders. By working together directly, I could speak to both the design rationale, as well as how, why and where to implement marketing best practices, balanced with the needs of the business.
• Focus strictly on the MVP to avoid scope creep and avoid delays further down the line!