CRU Online

CRU is a business intelligence company, and they have an online platform which subscribers use to access articles and data about commodities based on research and expert knowledge from analysts. The company recognised the need to bring fresh user-centric thinking into the next evolution of the platform, and I have been working on this project for over 3 years. In that time

Discovery

Whilst it delivers a great deal of information to subscribers, CRU wanted to spend some time researching if there were any opportunities to increase customer satisfaction on the platform. Our consultancy partnered with CRU to carry out research using clients and internal stakeholders, to gain insights into how the service was meeting customer needs.

Read more about the research and the Product Vision.

User Journeys and IA

We then analysed the user journeys for using the platform, and captured the pain points and opportunities we could see at each stage of the journey map. We could now see that, in order to help users get the information they needed faster and with clearer pathways, we needed to redesign the Information Architecture for the platform.

The platform was suffering from having a content model and Information Architecture that was a manifestation of the way customers were subscribing to information – not how they expected to find and use it. Content was being siloed in a strict hierarchy in the site, with a lot of cross publishing and duplication.

Redesigning the Content Model

Therefore we proposed to ‘flip’ the model upside down – we took the information found at the end of the branches and placed it ontop, using metadata to allow filtering using facets where users had a lot of subscriptions. This is harder than it sounds, due to the complexity of subscription models, but the whole team was onboard with the plan.

This allowed me to draft up a new IA sitemap for the platform, which we iterated through, before I started to create a wireframe prototype to communicate what the experience of navigating the site would be like.

Business Goals and Metrics

To formulate a good analytics strategy, I set out a brief guide and rationale for what was needed from a UX perspective. This included revisting the major Business Goals, thinking about:

• People – who will manage, interpret and most importantly take actions with data
• Process  – the process of report and alert distribution
• Tools – choosing the right analytics tools and integrating the data
• Measures – information overload is the challenge – finding the right measures to use in dashboards, alerts and for optimisation is needed to get the most from analytics

I then took the HEART analytics framework from Google Ventures and linked each aspect with the business goals, what signals to use and the metrics that we would then be able to measure desired business outcomes.

A major hurdle was identifying the best tools to measure these on the platform. The new iteration of Google Analytics has its drawbacks so we are working on a unified solution that addresses issues around accurate measurements, ease of use and segmentation across the entire platform.

Content Strategy

My main learning from working on this is that it takes time, but you have to start somewhere. Many organisations have developed processes over time, but often the methods and reasons behind them can be in the form of tacit or fragmented knowledge. And when it comes to document and communicate that as a strategy, it can be really hard to do. Many guides can tell you the theory, but not how to actually organise and document these things, and so I made some of my own templates to help our client break down and analyse all of their content. That step made a huge difference!

Design and Agile build

Following all this work I then worked with a visual designer to create a new style and patterns for the platform. I wanted the Development team to feel fully involved, so they joined us through the design process, and we produced Adobe XD handoffs containing all the assets and specifications they would need to implement the new UI.

After that I worked closely with the development team to realise the vision whilst allowing for improvements to happen as part of moving into working code.

Usability Testing

We were also looking to bake in usability testing into our sprints, so that we would get early feedback from users, and get some early seeds growing for platform champions and changing the client mindset to a user-centred one. We also wanted to have usability testing and research as part of adding new features and services to the platform as the product matures.

Building new UX on solid foundations

Since the relaunch of the platform the business has continued to push for more product innovation, and we can do that because we set some good foundations to build on. We still need to be disciplined in what we bring onto the roadmap, to make sure that it serves a purpose and is strategically sound and delivered well on a tactical level.

For that reason I was always present as the voice of UX weekly meetings, monthly strategic meetings, facilitated larger strategic workshops and kept a UX/Product blog in confluence to keep the entire team up to date on the latest updates and outcomes from UX!

Outcomes

The platform relaunch was well received, with customers commenting on the clean and easy to read article layouts and an improved experience for customising and filtering through news and analysis on the platform. Bounce rates were down, visitor time on the site went up and the mobile audience started to show an uptick also.

Since launching we have also developed:

• GenAI pilots to answer complex commodity analysis questions
• AI helpers for summarising and translating articles
• Price dashboards to dynamically pull in key commodity prices and intel
• More advanced tools for creating and distributing email alerts