Embark, a financial advisory and consulting firm, improves client relations with a new user-centric website.

User Experience Design

Who is Embark?

Embark Consulting, LLC is a boutique auditing and accounting firm specializing in accounting and finance consulting services.

Project Goals

Rebrand Embark
Improve user experience & flow
Increase user engagement & site content

Project Duration

4 months

My Role

Stakeholder Interviews

Usability Testing

The Problem

Embark's former site was a big problem. There were inconsistencies with design, messaging, and imagery. And I'd also mention performed incredibly slow. As you can imagine, all of these factors are a huge deal for anyone coming to your site for business.

The original website was built from a pretty simple web template. As the company and services started to expand, new "one-off" pages were created – all suggesting a different experience. Many of these one-off pages looked different and slowed down the performance of the website– all factors that could potentially hurt credibility.

Users & Audience

Embark's sweet spot is private companies, more specifically CFOs, needing help with an exit strategy and cleaning up their financials. They either lack the time, the team or the knowledge to perform these actions independently.

Scope & Constraints

This project was initially estimated to take six months. But with the new year coming up in less than four months, the stakeholders were pressed to get something up sooner than later.

My Process

I decided to follow BDC's UX Double Diamond Design Thinking process to ensure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.

The UX Double Diamond Process. Discover, define, develop and deliver.

phase 1: discover

User Interviews & Surveys

In order to build a better understanding of Embark's target audience, we conducted 4x 1 on 1 user interviews.

Characteristics that CFO's look for in a consultant:

Problem solvers
Leadership
Reliability
Wide range of expertise (more specially BIG 4 experience)
A cultural fit

Usability Testing - current site

We collected data on the challenges and opportunities of the current Embark website; covering content, key navigation elements, page flow and functionality.

Key Findings:

We discovered that many people were confused by who Embark was and what they did. Messaging and stock imagery were vague and unclear.
To follow up on the point above - there wasn't a lot of content about the services they offered or how it worked.
The team page performed really slow. When you clicked on a consultant's profile, it directed you to a new page. When you went back it refreshed the page and took you back to the top.

phase 2: define

affinity mapping

Inputs for the Affinity Map include:

User Interviews
Usability Tests on the current website
Stakeholder interviews

Persona creation

To start, I created a persona of a potential Embark customer based on user surveys and stakeholder interviews –– focusing on motivations, challenges, and their story.

summary

We understand that this audience is hyperfocused on making smart financial decisions on behalf of their company through our research. They need an intelligent group of consultants to help them understand the ever-changing world of corporate finance.

phase 3: develop

Information Architecture & user flows

We used a user-centric approach to defining and testing the IA for the reimagined Embark website.

content strategy

Because writing and messaging was a significant hiccup. We brought in a writer who had a financial/marketing background to help them hone in on messaging that would speak to their audience.

Ideating the Solution

Then it was time to start sketching. I came up with several potential solutions to each of the pain points and made some rough UI sketches. I did some preliminary validation on the Lo-Fi UI sketches and used the feedback to refine my sketches and narrow down my solutions for the Hi-Fi mockups.

phase 4: deliver

Prototyping and Validation

I jumped into Figma to create Hi-Fi clickable prototypes of my proposed solutions. I tested the prototype with two new individuals. Insights from the validation test led me to reiterate one of the screens. Below are the Hi-Fi mockups of my final solutions:

Team Page: Now with filtering for position and location

Team Page: Now with an in-page profile view

Resources Page: Now with filtering by resource type

Blog: Now with filtering by most popular topics, keywords or industries

Consulting Solutions Page:

Industry Page (Healthcare):

VIEW live site

Lessons & Takeaways

The team member page is one of the highest performing pages today.

Since launching this site in January 2019, Embark has opened three new offices and is projected to hit $24 million in revenue this year (up from $17 million last year). Bottom line, this was a fun project, I learned a lot, and I'm excited to see their company continue to grow.