Unified SWI Experience

Project Type

Website Re-design

Tasks

Research, Analytics, IA, UI/UX

Tools

Adobe analytics, Dynomapper, Figma

Timeline

4 Weeks

Background

Context

The Scotiabank Women Initiative (SWI) is a program designed to increase economic opportunities for women and women led businesses. It also focusses on empowering professional growth for women through various seminars, mentorship and boot camps. They currently have a global capital fund of 10 billion dollars to be deployed for this initiative.

Problem

Currently the SWI initiative has multiple facets, it not only supports canadian business but it also has an important presence in commercial businesses, global wealth management, and global markets. One of the biggest challenges that was put forth in front of me was to provide a unified experience for any user accessing the website. Also, to build a seamless navigation system that ensures users can navigate across all the experiences SWI initiative offers.

Objective

  • To create a central hub for all the current products that SWI offers with a user centric design.
  • Rethink the information architecture for the enterprise website
  • Design the user interface and user experience with existing brand guidelines

Initial Observations

Insights

During my initial observation phase I noticed that all the SWI sites that are currently live had some patterns with the overall information architecture and navigation.

User data and metrics

With access to the website data I had a better understanding of how users were currently navigating on the website and places where user experience can be improved.

Analysis

From the data observed above these were the following highlights

Unique visitors

2000/month

User Type

Desktop visitors (80%)

Bounce rate

83%

Redirection rate

Low

Information Architecture

Current State

As discussed above, the current state of the SWI site was disorganized and had multiple points of entry with no focus on the information hierarchy and architecture. Based on the initial analysis and observation below was the redesigned IA for the future state.

Future State

Lo-fi Prototype

Stakeholder discussions

After presenting different versions of the information architecture and initial prototypes to all the senior stakeholders we finally agreed on the layout and hierarchy.

lo-fi designs

Below are some images from the initial prototype.

Medium Fidelity Prototypes

Design Approach

Since it was a project that involved discussions with a large number of stakeholders it was tricky as a designer to be navigating in an environment where there are multiple opinions and design approaches. Sometimes it involved  going back to the design files to redo/undo changes. Eventually I was able to bring everyone onboard on the design changes and below are some images from the final prototypes.

Designs

Below is the redesigned homepage for the SWI initiative and other pages (Product Copy not finalized).

SWI Enterprise homepage
SWI Customer stories homepage
SWI Commercial product
SWI Customer stories

Reflection

Learnings

  • Goal focussed approach - One key takeaway for me personally from this project involved understanding the bigger picture of the project and its goal. There were times when I got distracted and spent too much over a specific product rather than focussing on unifying the SWI intitaitve.
  • Stakeholder management - The project involved interacting with multiple stakeholders every step of the way and understanding their vision. Sometimes it involved changing my perspective to match their vision and also the other way around. I soon realized a project like this could only be successful if there is an effective cooperation and partnership between all the teams.
  • Data always help - With the help of effective metrics I was able to influence stakeholders decision towards the design and vision I wanted to achieve. It also involved me proactively reaching out to teams to gather data rather than everything being given to me throughout the process.