The Challenge
To continue to grow their business, Eaton Vance needed a website that would give them a legitimate presence in the institutional space. At Hot Studio, I worked on the team that had created the look and feel for the retail site, but what works for retail advisors, doesn't quite work for those who deal with institutions. Therefore, Eaton Vance challenged us to create a site that would appeal to their institutional audience while remaining in alignment with their established brand.
The Process
As part of a larger strategic process, I interviewed institutional investors to understand how they do business and where the Eaton Vance website fits into their larger process. I created personas and user journey maps to show the day-to-day activities of people involved in institutional investing. We were able to use these insights to understand key points of differentiation between institutional investors and retail investors.
The Insight
Our research uncovered that institutional investors want to "drink from the firehose". They are highly skilled with backgrounds in mathematics. Tables of data and statistics don't phase them. Because of their status within the investment community, they want unfiltered and unfettered access to information. They want the inside scoop.
The Solution
I lead a design team of two other UX designers in a round of concept explorations where we applied the notion of "access" through services, products, and thought leadership. In the first concept, we demonstrated access by showcasing the way Eaton Vance creates ways for clients and consultants to be able to connect to the people in charge of creating the investment strategies at Eaton Vance.
Institutional investors play with big stakes and the consequences for mistakes are huge. We tapped into this with our second direction which highlighted the stability and consistency of Eaton Vance through the excellence of their products.
We produced a final direction to showcase Eaton Vance’s thought leadership and thought leaders. The idea being that institutional investors would have access to thought leadership not available on the retail side.
Through this exploration, we were able to iterate and come up with the final direction that brought the timely content of thought leadership (a brand pillar of Eaton Vance) and access together. This direction evolved the Eaton Vance brand while resonating with the needs of their clients.
