Phil Oye

About the project

The client is confidential, but we’re allowed to say that it is a large investment bank. They’re legit, trust me. The project was to create an intranet site for their bankers to research company information. In the words of a managing director, it is “Yahoo Finance for investment bankers with SmartMoney charts.”

My role on the project

I led the creative team consisting of an information architect, a graphic designer, and a content strategist. I also acted as the lead information architect and was accountable for the creative solution.

The solution

The main challenge of this project was presenting large quantities of company data—there was so much data and so many ways to present it. To address this, we conducted participitory design sessions where users, with the magic of scotch tape, constructed pages using charts and graphs from competitor sites, from their current intranet, and our sketches.

Rather than just deliver a bunch of wireframes, we created a user experience specification that included not only the wireframes, but also an explantion of how the site should work. This did not replace the technical documentation, but was much more approachable—pretty pictures being what they are. This extra document required additional work to ensure that it was in synch with the tech docs, but was worth it.

Our client could (and did) carry it around and would actually read it. I call that a success.

After four months of work, the project was unceremoniously killed right before we moved into implementation. Investment banking is always an early casualty in a market downturn. What a bummer.