Case study: T.Rowe Price

The Client

T.Rowe Price is an American investment bank. As part of a long-standing relationship with ELSE, I was UX Lead on a team working client-side in their London office.

A lot of the work that I did there was process-based, working with the UK head of technical delivery to better align working between the design office and technical team (see Design Ops section).

This particular case study is of a project I ran to redesign a mini-site related to Multi-Asset Solutions. Multi-asset solutions are a particular set of investment products which manage risk using a diversified investment strategy.

The brief

A new head of mult-assets solutions had been appointed. She felt that the mini-site was not conveying the value proposition of T Rowe’s offer in the market.

As well as being a public-facing website, site, the content was used as sales collateral in remote meetings with potential clients. The structure as it was didn’t lend itself to that kind of use.

There was a restriction that the department didn’t have the budget for any technical development, and so the rework had to be done using only existing site components.

My Role

I was a team of one on this project. As such I was the UX designer, but also had to create a delivery plan and manage the time spent on it so as to keep within the agreed budget and timescale.

The site contained specific sales and marketing content relating to complex financial instruments. As you can probably tell from the vague definition I started with, I still don’t really understand what multi-assets solutions are. So I was never going to be able to rewrite it myself - it would need close collaboration with my stakeholders, most of whom were based in the US office.

First steps - Analysis

I started with a heuristic review of the current site. It was clear that the content lacked narrative and onward journeys were not clear.

It also treated users all the same. There was no allowance for different stages in the investment process. I started scamping out a journey which had different entry points to allow users to jump in and out of the narrative over multiple site visits.

I considered three user types:

  • New to multi-asset investing

  • Familiar with the investment strategy but new to T.Rowe Price as an operator in the market

  • Familiar with both and just needing support to select the right product

I used some concepts from Don Norman’s Emotional Design framework to produce a content model based on a pyramid approach.

This gave me a clear set of guidelines, which would also be relatable for a group of stakeholders not used to thinking of content as the basis of a user experience.

Next steps - Ideation

My clients were bankers not content managers, so I designed a workshop to coach them through a process of auditing the content and placing it in one of the steps in the pyramid. I also asked them to look out for any gaps that needed filling.

The snag here was that my stakeholders were all in the US office and the budget didn’t stretch to an air fare for me.

I briefed a T.Rowe designer in the Baltimore office so that they could facilitate while I dialed in over a video link.

I structured the workshop around a set of worksheets which could be covered in post-it notes and scanned, and were later physically brought back to London by a friendly person on a business trip.

Using what I’d learned from the workshop, I created a set of journey maps.

That gave me my key page templates which I began to work up, first as scamps and then as wireframes which I made into a prototype in order to help bring them to life for the multi-asset team.

I also found out that they were heavy users of the comment & approve workflow in Adobe Acrobat as they used it to work on contracts with their legal team, so I sent the wires as PDFs so that they could comment on them using a familiar workflow.

Outcomes

Sales of these kinds of products have a long lead-time and aren’t done through the website, so it’s hard to put numbers on the impact of the changes.

Certainly the new pages were well-received by the target users - as one put it, “I don’t have to apologise in meetings any more”.

Based on this work, we were also commissioned by the US Equities team to conduct a similar review of their pages.