1. BG wants to rebrand as the innovative, forward thinking with long-term vision, and need their website to reflect the new narrative.
2. Visual upgrade both global site, and create a Chinese local site.
3. Build trust and connection for both potential and existing investors.
History Record vs. Forward Thinking
Through diving into their current marketing materials, we found the visuals are mostly dark & conservative color scheme, which lacks elements that implies innovative approach. There's potentially miss opportunities to connect with futuristic / tech-savvy investors.
Non-Professional & Professional investors
Since the content strategy has already been defined, we hope to get insights about how to streamline the visual arrangement of page content in a way that makes sense to both user groups.
We recruited 30+ Participants internally (due to the time constraint) and through online forum. We conducted interviews in-person and through video call with them.
Based on the interview result, we first did a usability and accessibility evaluation for BG’s current site key pages before the redesign.
We also looked at Baillie Gifford’s main competitors’ digital presence for benchmarking, and opportunities to differentiate.
Combining the defined content strategy with new findings, we rethink about the info architecture.
To enhance info accessibility and build a robust language-change proof visual system, we start by condensing the content to limited types of sizes.
To enhance info accessibility and build a robust language-change proof visual system, we start by condensing the content to limited types of sizes.
We introduced more filters on both the "strategies" & "insights" page that has large amount of articles and multimedia contents to bring more focus to the information.
I streamlined the article format into 3 types of layout for:
1. Text only content
2. Text + Image
3. Full width video & other multimedia contents.
The detailed fund information is only available to professional investors who understands the risks better, the general users would be prompted to schedule a discussion with fund administers.
The key differentiator for Baillie Gifford is their “Unlimited Liability Partnership”, which we highlighted in multiple times.
We kept the language switch in mind while designing the English site, the majority content layout fits into the same layout system with a few exceptions.
Chinese characters are more visually complex and bulky. It looks visually crowded if maintaining the same layout. Therefore, we adopted a hamburger menu to enclose all the tabs, while keeping the visual consistency.
Baillie Gifford’s Chinese customer base is relatively small as they entered China market in 1995, therefore we added a special data section illustrating Baillie Gifford’s global success for Chinese new investors.
The site is live in both Global & Chinese version.
*Note that the version you are seeing would differ from our design due to further updates. Different countries adjusted content subject to local regulations. Our design only applies to the general case.
Need a more defined user testing framework.
Due to the tight timeframe of the project, we invited our co-workers internally to test the interface, and provide feedback about the navigation experience. It would benefit more if we approach this with a more systemic approach that involves specific tasks.
Content Strategy & Project scope
We still did research although a specific content strategy was defined. Although the design team recommend personalized contents for different investor types, it’s out of the current scope. The project would better off by integrating research better.
