FinTech Website Design
Parametric – Seattle, WA
The company was rebranding and also needed to update its web presence. They had been using an outdated website design on an opensource CMS. The decision was made to redesign the website from the ground up and build it on the Sitecore CMS.
Client Overview
Parametric is an investment advisor and FinTech company that manages nearly $300B in assets. For 30 years they have specialized in working with wealth managers and institutions using their proprietary software and reporting platform.
I worked as Art Director and lead the design direction for the company. I also managed their Design, Digital Marketing, and Internal Communications teams.
Parametric is a leader in beta investing strategies for B2B clients, which has in recent years become a major investment trend and many large firms such as BlackRock have launched their own programs to compete.
Project Details
Project Skills Information Architecture, Content Strategy, UX/UI Design, Prototyping
Development Slalom
Duration 12 weeks
The Problem
To compete with these larger firms, they needed to rebrand the company and also update its web presence. Parametric had been using an outdated website design on an opensource CMS. The decision was made to redesign the website from the ground up and build it on the much more robust Sitecore CMS.
The Users
The main website clients were first broken down into a few categories – wealth managers and high-wealth individuals, institutions, press, and potential employees. Working with our sales, customer service and HR staff we worked up basic personas for each of these users to help us better craft the information architecture and content for the website.
Information Architecture
We knew from our analytics data that about 75% of our web traffic were new visitors and we also need to be able to direct them to content that was made either for Wealth Managers or Institutions. So, we decided to create a landing page for each of those user types under Investors. On the homepage we knew wanted to have a way for people to identify which type of user they were. We also divided up the product offerings to make it clear which products were only available to institutional investors. We kept the insights and research section which housed all of the whitepapers and articles. A blog section was added to for more digestible and sharable content and to improve SEO by having new content generated frequently.
Sketching
We sketched out many ideas for the homepage and the solutions page to find something that would work well and that we could accomplish using Sitecore.
Once we were agreed on the basic layout, we created simple wireframes in a word processor that could be passed among the team and where we could add content. Once that had been reviewed by the team and some stakeholders and decision makers, we created hi-res prototypes of the homepage in Sketch.
Final UI
After the design was approved, we moved through a series of design and development sprints with our Agile team we hired to build the site. I would design a number of pages every two weeks and the following two weeks those would be built and validated. We continued this process for about three months until we were ready to test the full site.
During this time, we were also creating all of the other brand elements, letterhead, envelopes, emails templates, signage, and more.
Results
The new brand was launched at a bell ringing at the New York Stock Exchange and immediately received a great response from Parametric’s clients.
As a result of the changes, web traffic rose by 350% in the first year. We were also to better identify which types of users were engaging with our content and which topics were resonating most with them which, in turn, helped to create more valuable content.
Next Project
Mobile Website Design
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