<aside> ☝🏻 Fun Fact: I started working with this client soon after hiring a financial advisor of my own, and I ended up impressing him with all the terms and concepts I understood because of my work with Dodge&Cox.

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🤔 Things I learned

• Client interactions and collaboration
• how different industries have different expectations of design

🔑 Key activities

• Stakeholder interviews
• User journey mapping and co-creation workshops and validation
• Site map design in collaboration with content strategist who preformed a content audit
• Wireframing of new site
• Weekly client design reviews
• Crafting and facilitating of user testing (21+ interviews over 2 weeks)

🌟 My Project Highlights

• a lot of face time with the client
• autonomy from the creative director
• can see how my work in directly reflected in the final live product - exciting for this level of my career

Stakeholder Interviews

Our project began with a series of virtual 1-hour stakeholder interviews to understand both business and user needs for each of the five distinct user groups (institutional investors, financial professionals, individual investors, third-party consultants, and prospective talent). I personally both moderated and provided note-taking and synthesis support for the interviews.

Competitive Analysis

Like any good redesign project, we started out researching the competitors and industry partners of Dodge&Cox to understand what financial customers were encountering and expecting in the field. While we knew that we would be receiving branding and tone parameters from a partner agency, we wanted to make sure that our redesign of Dodge&Cox met expectations of users and provided an experience that was both outstanding in the field while not breaking patterns that advisors were used to working with on other sites.

User Journey Mapping

From the insights we gathered during stakeholder interviews, we began to craft user flows for each of the five user groups of the company. Because these journeys were quite complicated and involved the subject area of finance (that none of the designers were experts on - shocker 😂), we then held a co-creation session with client stakeholders. This allowed us to validate our assumptions and build out potential pain point and opportunity areas of the site while keeping our client engaged throughout the design exploration process.

An example of a flow that was used in our co-creation and validation workshop

Building Wireframes of Site

As the visual designers on our team began crafting style tiles for various visual directions for the redesigned site experience, the other UX designer and I started building out medium fidelity wireframes. Some of the areas that I owned were:

• Pre-Homepage Segmentation of Users - During this stage of the design process, we decided to focus on 3 separate user segments and their personalized site experiences, but before users could even get to the homepage, they needed to self identify on a pre-home page. This was important as it was a legal requirement, and we knew each type of customer would be shown slightly different content as their goals vary significantly. In building these frames, I focused on clear communication (visual and copy) to allow for quick and accurate self identification.
• Homepage - As stated above, we were focusing on 3 separate site experiences, so building the homepage focused on showcasing appropriate content with appropriate information hierarchy while portraying the relevant value proposition of Dodge&Cox to each particular user segment.
• About Us and Careers - For these sections, I worked closely with the with content strategist and copywriter to develop pages that told the Dodge&Cox story through sections like CSR and community involvement. I also restructured the careers section to clearly differentiate between content for interns/new college grads and later career hires.
• Insights - As a wealth asset manager, Dodge&Cox produces a sizable body of insights and thought leadership. I crafted a reusable and interactive template that could be customized to fit the 4-5 different content types produced by the company.