Overview
Ran a structured discovery workshop, covering card sorting, site mapping and customer-journey analysis, for a global investment bank's website, producing a workshop report to guide the site's future information architecture.
Who This Is For
Banks and financial services firms whose websites serve several very different client groups through the same content. This case is most useful if:
- institutional, corporate and retail clients use the same site in different ways
- your current structure reflects departments rather than how visitors think
- you are about to redesign and want evidence before deciding the structure
- you need findings documented for the decisions that follow
The Challenge
The bank's site had to work for very different audiences: institutional clients, corporate finance clients, retail wealth-management clients and internal stakeholders, each with different journeys through the same content.
Before any redesign could start, the bank needed an evidence-based picture of how visitors actually grouped and navigated its content, not an internal guess at the right structure.
Our Approach
The team now behind ECM.DEV ran a discovery and information architecture workshop for the bank.
- Card sorting: exercises showing how real users grouped the bank's content.
- Existing structure review: current site maps and channel data examined alongside the card-sort results.
- Journey tracks by audience: customer journeys mapped separately for each audience group.
- A versioned report: findings and recommendations written up after the workshop.
Impact
Evidence over assumption. Card sorting showed how real users grouped content, rather than relying on how the bank's departments were organised.
Several audiences, one coherent structure. Journeys mapped for each audience, so the resulting architecture served all of them, not just the loudest internal stakeholder.
A documented handover. A versioned report gave the bank a durable reference for the decisions made, not just workshop-day sticky notes.
Information architecture decided in a meeting room tends to mirror the organisation chart. Card sorting is a cheap way to find out what clients actually expect.
This work was delivered while employed at Making Waves (later NoA Ignite). Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
Topics
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