Overview
World Gold Council are the guardians and advisors of the gold market around the world. Offering services and advice on gold investment, management and storage.
Problem statement
Their digital estate is vast and has expanded over time. It has now grown so big that it is quickly becoming difficult to manage. World Gold Council has an estate of 11 different websites scattered across the world mostly due to reactive decisions based on the market.
Users and audience
World Gold Council have 3 core audiences; Institutional (banks and finance sector), Individuals (individuals looking to invest in gold) and Industry (retail investors and gold vendors).
Roles and responsibilities
The project team: Experience design lead, experience designer (me), senior project manager, client partner, business consultancy director, Chief Marketing Officer (WGC)
My personal roles on the project:
- supporting the XD lead
- supporting the XD lead
- stakeholder management
- stakeholder workshop facilitation
- stakeholder interview facilitation with participants from around the world (including UK, India, Singapore)
- analysis
- digital estate visualisations
- heuristic evaluations
- journey mapping
- site map creation
- design maturity assessment
- content audit
- hypothesis and findings playback
Scope and constraints
The first phase was to scope out the existing digital estate, map it out and come up with findings and a hypothesis to play back to the stakeholders. Helping the client answer: “Should we consolidate our digital ecosystem, and if so how should we do it?”.
The process and what I did
The project was split into 4 phases:
Phase1: Immersion - Kick off meetings, stakeholder mapping, business goals alignment and worksop, stakeholder interviews.
Phase 2: Review of analytics and existing research that WGC have. Audit 11 websites from multiple perspectives: customer experience, usability, information architecture, content, brand and technology. Forming a hypothesis to take forward and validate.
Phase 3: User testing, finding and analysis.
Phase 4: Workshops to co create the vision of the future. Develop a digital ecosystem roadmap for gradual rollout.
Outcomes and lessons
High level findings:
1. Goldhub has to become its own entity
2. The architecture and journeys of gold.org need to be re-aligned with user needs
3. There’s a need for a design system to further strengthen the brand
4. The future ecosystem needs clear rules around governance
5. The future sites need to enable the shift from monologue (brand talking at people) to a dialogue (meaningful interaction with audiences)
Audience split and where the websites sit
User journey maps
Sitemaps
Design maturity assessment of existing websites
We set a criteria based on the brand vision, values, aspirations and desired impression to assess all 11 websites against. The criteria was comprised of; first impressions (good, ok and bad), grid, typography, calls to action, navigation, visual content quality, motion and interactivity and small screen experience. We also explained what those meant and the impacts of our thinking,
Heuristic evaluations
A heuristic evaluation was done for every site in the ecosystem against the same criteria.
Tools
Figma, Excel, Dovetail, Mural, Google Sheets
Role
Experience Designer