Legal & General Adviser Protection – site refresh

A revised information architecture that clearly demonstrates the business proposition. Of which has been deeply researched into how we can best support our customers at any given point in their journey.

The problem

"The online web content within the Adviser protection space is providing unnecessary pain and friction for customers. The overall information architecture does not align to mental models, leaving advisers feeling lost and overwhelmed while navigating the site."

The vision

Role

Experience Designer, working collaboratively with colleagues across UX disciplines, e.g content designers, user researchers and business stakeholders.

Research & Empathise

To understand the various problems to solve from a customer, business, and technology perspective, I facilitated a remote kick-off workshop with a number of key stakeholders. The output created a sense of alignment and a north start vision to work towards.

I truly value the importance of research as part of any design project. With the volume of work required, I spent a considerable amount of time in the discovery phase to fully adopt the mindset of our target audience.

Areas explored

Analytics data
Menu navigation behaviours
Wider in-page interaction
CSAT rating exploration
Competitor analysis
Content review
Depth interviews

As mentioned above, I was able to get agreement with the business to organise and facilitate a series of depth interviews over a two week period.

Research goals

To validate the goals, behaviours, and expectations of Protection advisers to inform the creation of personas
To validate the proposed adviser sales cycle
Understand if the navigation and labelling matches/differs to users’ mental models
What in terms of content, is most / least helpful to advisers
Recommendations for improvement to support adviser journey

Define

The output from the discovery phase allowed me to prioritise the most important problems to solve, understand the goals, behaviours and expectation of our users and clearly communicate opportunities to our stakeholders.

Post interview affinity diagrams

Post it notes in named groups for Mortgage broker

Post it notes in named groups for Protection adviser

Persona development

Details about Fian including his bio, motivation, expectations and pain points

Details about Mila including his bio, motivation, expectations and pain points

I spent a considerable amount of time running tree tests and card sorts with a panel of end users (Protection advisers) to establish a revised information architecture that was both customer-centric and aligned to mental models.

Ideate

Creating visual displays from card sorting outputs enabled stakeholders to understanding how advisers were grouping content. I began sketching concepts for new page designs, working alongside our UI Designer to create a higher fidelity view to share back with stakeholders. This was an iterative exercise where we began refining our designs based on cms constraints and user testing insights.

Prototype/test

I ran a series of usability tests with the same panel of advisers from our early discovery phase to validate design ideas. Mapping out several core journey that had been established from research, that would enable us to further refine our designs as needed.

What would I do differently?

I ran a design retro with the core working group to celebrate the success of collaborative work but also to identify what could be done differently. As a team we identified the following,

Definition of roles and responsibilities early on
Develop ways of working to allow for external collaboration
Delegation of work to avoid overload within the working group