Allan Gray

Case Study

Allan Gray is a South African investment management company, with sister companies Allan Gray Australia and Orbis Investment Management operating overseas. Allan Gray prides itself on contrarian investing; identifying and scrutinising opportunities that aren't necessarily "obvious".

I was approached by Allan Gray Australia to review their current website offering, and come up with a design that better serves two unique user groups; individuals and advisers. Their present site is hosted in WordPress and has an asymmetric navigation for these two user groupies. It was noted that one of the navigational items causes the entire global navigation to change, which causes disorientation in the users.

Dom Ambroggio (Head of Marketing), Alex Davies (Marketing Mananger) and I worked together to define user flows, action workshops to determine proposed information architecture, and design wireframes for the future upgrade.

YEAR

April - July 2022

MY ROLE

UX Design Lead
UI Design Lead

EMPLOYED BY

DISCOVERY WORKSHOPS

At the start of the engagement, I like to take time to run a "Hopes & Fears" activity. This allows me to cement my understanding of the brief, and provide stakeholders an opportunity to share what they hope to achieve through this course of work, and what they wish to avoid. I ran this activity, along with an IA card sort and group interview with both the Adviser team and the Business Development team.

The IA card sort permits me a view into the mental models of each individual and identify emerging groups of navigational items. Taking photos of each participant's cardsort, I then fed the data into Optimal Workshop and generated some similarity matrices to help build out a proposed information architecture:

This IA was ultimately rejected and reviewed to service a split-site site design, where users could switch between "investor" and "adviser", more can be found further below under "Review of IA"

USER PERSONAS

Coupled with the information gathered in group interviews, and data provided from Dom and Alex, these were the two personas we came up with:

MAPPING KEY USER FLOWS & ON SITE ITEMS

Before getting deep into the information architecture, I sat down with Dom and Alex to understand the typical user flows of each user group. Together, we identified where users typically landed on the site, where they'd navigate to and why, and what they would do off-site.

A REVIEW OF IA

Initially, we buillt four different iterations of IA based on detailied interaction flows, to account for the users visiting from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, each with varying access rights based on their geolocation. This was then condensed into two examples of IA, as it is common for South African investors to invest in AGA's funds, whilst visitors from New Zealand could only see the adviser-side of the Allan Gray Australia site:

BLUE SKY DESIGN

After conducting landscape research (not pictured as Miro board was too big), running through each example with stakeholders to see what elements they liked, I came up with a blue sky design for them to review. Ultimately this design was deemed to be too far from the Allan Gray brand identity, I accepted this feedback and came up with some additional wireframes that were closer to the essence of Allan Gray.

CONCEPT REDESIGN - MIDFIDELITY WIREFRAMES

Due to an impending deadline and wanting to stay on budget, I negotiated with Dom and Alex to create a set of page templates that would contain all of the content blocks they would need to build out further pages. Some of these page designs are missing images as we could not find an appropriate image at the time. We agreed that so long as it is marked as an image, marketing could take time after the engagment to find the right marketing collateral.

PROTOTYPE

Contact

Email: afrosthead@gmail.com