How do you improve an online platform?

Merrill Lynch financial advisors use a proprietary online authoring tool [Marketing Materials on Demand (MMOD)] to create customized marketing materials. The platform allows users to upload content, select layouts, and generate high resolution PDF files for printing.

Pain points:

The platform was not living up to its promise and the financial advisors were struggling to use it.

the interface could not accommodate the content users wanted to include
users were frustrated by limited layout options
most importantly, users were expressing their frustration up the chain of command

My solution:

I was tasked by the marketing team with analyzing and improving the user experience. I was able to resolve customer pain points by:

redefining the content requirements
expanding the template offerings
simplifying the existing user flow
streamlining the interface

User Experience

Strategy Award

By simplifying the existing user flow, streamlining the interface, and expanding the template offerings, overall site use increased between 35 – 50%.

Financial advisors clearly appreciated the effort and so did the Gramercy Institute, which selected our team for a Financial Marketing Strategy Award.

User Flow

Analysis

Our team sought feedback from financial advisors who had been using the online authoring platform. Their input identified several pain points, but primarily the need for a simplified process. Analysis of the existing flow helped identify unnecessary bottlenecks and allowed us to streamline the user flow to just six logical steps.

Requirements

Design Audit

I reviewed hundreds of existing printed brochures, flyers, and postcards and asked advisors to share examples of content that the current templates could not accommodate. Advisor input helped identify features that were missing from the existing tool:

templates that could accommodate growing teams
templates that allowed advisors to list all of their professional designations
templates with and without advisor biographies
templates with multiple photo options, including larger team and individual photos

Content Analysis

To accommodate and modularize the content, I identified required fields and established minimum and maximum character counts per field. These newly captured requirements became the road map for the interface and template redesign.

Design System

Modularity

I defined how advisors would be represented by combining a photo with a content block consisting of fields identified in the requirements document.

This “lockup” became the building block for a series of modular templates. Designed to be variable (number of professional designations, with or without a biography, email / phone number—or both, etc.), the appropriate lockup would be automatically triggered by decisions made during the input process, such as:

type of template selected (postcard, flyer, brochure)
size of financial team (number of advisors)
inclusion/exclusion of advisor biographies

Templates

Production

Working with the development team, we identified and prioritized new templates to:

accommodate teams of varying sizes
enable financial advisors to list all of their professional designations
provide multiple photo options per team, including larger team and individual photos

Maximum character counts were defined for each text block so the platform could be programmed to alert users of overage as they entered their content.