MJ Hudson | Develop, maintain, grow and manage new site from scratch
*Unfortunately, since MJ Hudson was acquired by Apex, the site no longer exists. See a video of some key flows, below.
PROCESSES
Project canvas | Competitive analysis | Surveys | User flows | Personas | JTBD & scenarios | Usability tests | Paper prototypes | Mid-fi to hi-fi wireframes | Design system creation | Project management | Feature prioritisation | Hotjar | Google Analytics | SEO | SEM | Campaign marketing | Content & video production | Social media content & tracking
BUSINESS GOALS MET
Improve user data tracking
Increase event sign up
Optimise and increase conversion rates (report downloads, sign ups, meeting requests, and more)
Decrease bounce rate
Optimise SEO and increase organic traffic
Streamline complex business sectors and improve cross selling by optimising user flows
Create fully end-to-end customer funnels across website, email, social, and marketing materials.
Homogenise various business outlets with a distinct visual rebrand
Future proof design features with a coherent design system to cope with further anticipated growth
Establish and display company culture across various outlets
ORIGINAL BRIEF
Build, design and prototype a new site for MJ Hudson to promote services, content, events and brand. Take from the various misaligned existing sites and develop into a single supersite. Consider standalone flows and features for investors.
OVERVIEW
MJ Hudson is an asset management consultancy that provides a full range of integrated services. Over the previous decade, MJ Hudson has grew while also acquiring numerous companies/services. With this unmanaged growth, a Frankenstein site developed with the “main” site breaking off into various tributaries for siloed services. These sites had lost their way with a deep sitemap, hidden pages and diluted design systems.
My primary project at MJ Hudson was to combine these break-off sites into one full site that allows users to easily and intuitively manoeuvre MJ Hudson’s wealth of services. I also had to consider promotion of features such as cataloguing their expertly produced content (including articles, research paper, guides, webinars and podcasts), as well as events, job vacancies, investor opportunities, and other such things. This project went along with a full company rebrand. With the rebrand I was afforded the opportunity to develop a new design system of digital features to create a repeatable and familiar structure for the future of the site.
IMAGES
OUTCOME
MJ Hudson acquired my services to see the benefits of UX/UI design. I am incredibly proud to say that I turned a 3 months internship into a full-time role. As the first and only UX/UI employee across a 600+ person company, I managed every project end-to-end, presenting research and designs to stakeholder and working closely with devs. The video, below, shows the paths to some of the key pages on the site.
Initially, I did a full and extensive review of the existing sites alongside a competitive analysis. From here, I determined the key to success would be to fully restructure the navigation and start from scratch to house this incredible depth of content. After various user flows and iterations of paper prototypes we had a great skeleton of what would later expand into a full sitemap. As I developed prototypes from paper to hi-fi design, I conducted multiple stages of usability testing to keep decisions in line with user needs.
With the new structure, I made the sitemap flatter and brought in all the pages that had been hidden behind barriers, or lost altogether. Thanks to this, the speed at which a user could find what they were looking for was hugely improved. We saw the greatest improvement across the new, streamlined Our services hub, Our people hub, and Our thinking hub. We know from our HotJar analysis that we had set up appropriate paths and signpost and the user is now easily and intuitively guided through the content. This has allowed MJ Hudson to promote content more appropriately.
We were successful in meeting all of the business goals set. By promoting key contacts across each service and setting up direct lines of communication, the business development team was able to convert these initial stages of contact into £100,000s of additional business. The branding is coherent and concise, and the digital features are future proofed for anticipated growth, which has already taken place with multiple additional pages since launch. Cross-selling of services improved significantly. With more sophisticated data-capturing and implementation of SEO across the site, you can see that every valuable metric was improve upon.
This Google Analytics dashboard, below, compares the 6 months either side of the site launch and shows that:
Bounce rate decreased
Conversion rate (downloads, site sign ups, event sign ups, meeting requests, and more) increased dramatically
Targeted social and paid campaigns and their conversion rates increased dramatically
Total sessions increased, both new and returning
Average session length increased
Organic and referral traffic increased
Users are being appropriately targeted to the key pages
Growing into the role, I was also afforded the opportunity to build unique and flexible landing pages, produce and edit video content (A-Z of terrible fund marketing series), work with the Harlequins Women rugby team (sponsored by MJ Hudson) on content, produce social campaigns and more. For Quins, I created and promoted a set of Instagram stickers that reached over 5 million views online within the first 6 months.
Below, you can see some statistics on the Quins campaign and an video from the A-Z campaign that I helped write, direct, produce, edit and distribute.
LESSONS LEARNED
Working to a complex real-world brief and cross-company communication
Improved skills with - Adobe XD, Figma, Adobe Premier Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, Azure
Working with a wider team of devs, marketing and business specialists
Project management and leading key meetings with the help of Azure
Communicating UX reasoning to lay people
SEO optimisation
Simplifying incredibly complex navigation into an intuitive journey, tested and proven with HotJar and Google Analytics
In-depth knowledge of financial content and in-house business divisions
Hi-fi prototyping + development and implementation of a robust design system
Applying UX fundamentals to achieve business metrics
Video & audio editing
Working with clients and SaaS
Presentation skills
Working remotely