Responsive Website for Learnvest Editorial

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Problem to solve

  • Learnvest’s editorial site was not optimised for mobile which was affecting the rankings within search engine results.
  • Although statistics informed us on high volumes when articles were promoted via other channels, there was very low recirculation i.e. users often did not continue to read other content

Discovery and research

Started with an audit
Reviewed the type of articles and the tone of voice, as well as understand the target audience. I also research sites of our competitors or with similar content, and a comparative analysis of other editorial sites.
View PDF – Audit of LV Content

Existing design had a navigation which was not self-explanatory and three types of article pages which was resolved into one for consistency

Existing sitemap
Sitemap of the navigation and categories – tags were also used but not included in sitemap.

Proposed Strategy

Started with an overall goal for the editorial content site so that is tied to the company’s mission statement



Resolving the Information Architecture
Consolidated the categories to allow only 6 to reside in the primary navigation, and 4 other “hidden” categories which will be surfaced by leveraging the use of tags and modules within the site to help recirculate content of interest to the user. i.e. top articles, most popular and sorting by content type (e.g. video, quizzes and checklists)

Navigation items were informed by SEO research (by external company) and card sorting by the research team helped allocate which categories to promote.

Design Solution

Overview

Article and Video
Articles and videos were tackled first to ensure they were optimised for mobile to improve rankings within search engine results.

Main focus in the design of the article page was to improve the readability without distractions and reduce the paradox of choice for the user when deciding what content to view next.

Home and Category landing page
To resolve the discussions between stakeholders on the goal of the editorial site, two directions were created to decide what type of product we wanted to provide for our audience. Direction 1 is a knowledge base of all personal finance needs, where as direction 2 is a guided approach to introduce the Learnvest methodology to financial planning.

A combination of the two design directions were used for the home and category landing pages

Search results
Pages with a list of results had similar template for consistency e.g. search results, content with a specific tag, a special collection/topic, and content by contributor

Resources landing page
A page to review all the interactive media such as tools & calculators, quizzes, slideshows and checklists

Slideshows