Design Thinking at Scale
Multi-Site Bio Profile Template UI
Create a stakeholder biography page template that will blend seamlessly with the brands of each of the 95+ Carson Partner websites, support a range of information that varies from person to person, with the aim of making these pages more dynamic and search-friendly.
What this says about me...
- Considers the big picture and the small details
- Rises to enterprise-level design challenges
- Synthesizes business goals and user needs
- Considers secondary stakeholder needs
- Collaborates with strategists and developers
Role
Digital Experience Designer
Template Strategist
Information Architect
Visual Designer
Stakeholder Partner
Team
Director of Web Stratedy, Web Developer
Tools
Sketch | Zeplin
Overview
Carson Group provides professional services to financial advisor firms, including website design and management. The sites are primarily template-based with optional customization. As Carson’s network of websites expanded, content teams relied on separate team member pages and author pages with minimal structure creating inconsistencies and fragmented user experiences. A scalable framework was needed to support content variability while maintaining brand consistency and growing discoverability across an expanding digital ecosystem.
Business Challenge from the creative brief:
Improve SEO rankings for Carson Wealth and for our Partners by improving our Team Member/Author pages by merging the two different pages into one profile page for each advisor/thought leader and including more information about each to include relevant keyword strategy. Improve SEO rankings for Thought Leaders by creating a robust profile that can be linked out to more internal and external content and publications.
This is how we do it
discover
Research
Understand
Empathize
define
Problem
Goals
Market Position
design
Ideate
Prototype & Test
Iterate
— discover —
User Research Summary
The users for this template could be divided into three distinct groups:
- Financial advisors who are sharing their biography information on their website.
- Web designers, developers, and administators who would input the information.
- Potential financial advisory clients who are searching for information about an advisor.
User Stories
Jamie As a financial advisor who wants to build my book of business, I want to share important credentials and showcase my personality, so that potential clients will trust me to advise them.
Chelsea As a digital marketing specialist who sometimes updates advisors information on their websites, I want to easily understand where to add or remove each type of input, so that I can work efficiently and not have to ask for help.
Susan As a person seeeking a financial advisor, I want to learn about what different advisors do and their values, so that I can decide if they are a good fit to help me manage my finances.
— define —
Pain Points
Inconsistent Biographies
Information provided in each bio varied widely making comparrisons difficult.
Not Scannable
Bio text was long form and had to be read to compare one advisor to another.
Missing Keywords
Search terms that would help a person find an advisor were rarely used in existing bios.
Goal Statement
Create a scalable design system for recurring content types that would convey information well for all stakeholders, from an intern to the most credentialed stakeholder, and adapt seamlessly to the brand palette of every existing and new partner website while conforming to the current look and feel of the existing web templates, and including the options to showcase the most requested bio customizations.
Value Proposition
By creating a robust profile that includes SEO optimized keywords in a scannable and comparable format, we increase the value of the stakeholder bio pages by making them more easily found, consumed, and evaluated.
Design Governance
Brand consistency and flexibility were of the utmost importance. The design needed to create a consistent structure, yet adaptable to each site’s branding at scale. Addressing editorial concerns with frequently requested modifications and customizations. Documentation and training support for implementers rounds out the project scope.
— design —
Mockups
This project had plenty of iteration, but due to lack of formal UX training, this project skipped over the sketching and wireframe stages and went straight into mockups. Here are a few of the early versions:
Stress Testing
Once a direction was chosen and approved by the director of web strategy, I wanted to “stress test” the design to make sure that we had considered how the page would look under extreme cirecumstances and somewhere in the middle. Making the elements modular allows them to collaps or expand to great effect. The first sentence in the bio is dynamically generated by inputs in order to create a search optimized call out right at the top of the page.
- Short name
- No credentials
- Brief bio
- Short experience
- Minimal education
- One location
- No extras
- Medium length name
- Two credentials
- Video
- Moderate length bio
- Moderate experience
- Advanced education
- Certifications
- One location
- Social Links
- Professional Memberships
- Awards
- Specified services
- Expertise
- Images
- Blog entries
- Long name
- Many credentials
- Video
- Long bio
- Favorite quote
- Advanced experience
- Advanced education
- Many Certifications
- Multiple location
- Social Links
- Professional Memberships
- Awards
- Specified services
- Expertise
- Target Audience
- Images
- Blog entries
The Other User Experience
The back end, where information is filled out. This was created by the developer on the team. We collaborated on the types of inputs that might make this complicated process easier for administrators that might not be comfortable with WordPress.
— reflect —
Impact
This bio template has since been developed and rolled out to 100+ websites. This template is the default template for new partner site designs.
Having a more robust bio template has changed the way that information is gathered for new bios, allowing us to enhance each stakeholder’s individual listing to their desired degree.
Unfortunately, no key performance indicators (KPI) were set or followed up on in order to determine the actual impact this might have had on search engine optimization (SEO) for these profiles.
The key information fields have been used as structured data in a more recent search revamp to help users filter advisors by qualifications rather than simply by location.
What I learned
Understanding all of the user groups and their distinct needs and expectations is tremendously helpful in creating a successful product.
Basic SEO knowledge impacted my approach to this project. Never underestimate the cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas to bolster innovation.
In hindsight, initial paper wireframes and digital wireframes could have saved me a lot of time. Knowing what I know now, I would have requested user testing early in the process and set KPIs and a timeline for assessing the project’s effectiveness.
This project acted as a catalyst for other enterprise-wide template designs, including blog layout updates, and optional podcast, book, event and speaker landing page designs.
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