Barclays
Restructuring a website inline with user input
USER TESTING
STRATEGIC DIRECTION
UI & UX
USER RESEARCH
Barclays is a British multinational investment bank and financial services company. Barclays.co.uk and Barclays Investments are two large divisions of the bank with vast audiences, including staff and customers. Due to a lack of initial guidance and ownership, content had been added sporadically over the years with little consideration for structure—resulting in multiple pages with duplicate content, dead ends and links, and outdated articles.
This was undoubtedly affecting user experience, and it was found that Barclays had a potential annual loss of £9m due to poor signposting.
Analytics and audits
Through a thorough content audit that was ratified by cross-referencing analytics, we devised alternative structures that we tested iteratively with participants.
This also had to meet varying requirements from different product stakeholders, and adhere to regulatory requirements so as not to incur financial implications.
We created a foundation for the project with a simultaneous analysis of the bank's existing audience groupings to create segmentations for usability research recruitment and desk research into typical search behaviour in the context of retail banking.
We created and sent out digital questionnaires that would provide insight into users' behaviour and thoughts when navigating a bank's website. Coupled with a deep dive into the existing analytical data from the website, we were able to draw a bigger picture of patterns, uses and behaviours.
From here we hypothesised and created a set of navigation options and exercises to test with users.
Real insights, real results
Four rounds of user testing for a refined Information Architecture
Round 1: Structured interviews and card sorting exercises conducted online with 25 individual participants as a foundation for initial IA ideas
Round 2: Tree tests to learn from comparative responses between the existing IA and initial refined versions
Round 3: Tree tests to gain insights for further refined IA solutions and learn from comparative responses
Round 4: Final round of testing with ten participants using a full developed and refined IA mocked-up as the Barclays wesbite
Governance and guidance
We created a thorough document to help colleagues align new content with the revised Information Architecture of the website. This included context for the direction of the IA approach and the reasons behind the development, advice on content structuring and a flow to help ascertain the most suitable place for content to live.
