Phil Oye

Redesigning the marketing site

The project had three overarching goals: business, brand, and usability.

• The business wanted to increase assets under management, either by acquiring customers or by increasing wallet share with existing clients.
• Landor had developed a new brand for Morgan Stanley, one that had yet to be applied to a hopelessly fragmented Web site.
• Usability for the site was extremely poor due to multiple navigation schemes and a site organization that was not task-based and full of redundancies.

Refining the information architecture

Rationalizing the organic growth that had occurred on such a large site required user involvement. To develop an information architecture that users could understand we used card sorting.

The design

Our goal for the design was simple—clear communication and efficient navigation. Being a financial site, Morgan Stanley had plenty of data to present, we used good graphic design to make it clear. The site was large, we streamlined the navigation to focus on drill-down rather than provide access from every page to every page.

The live site

The redesign of the marketing site went live in February 2002 and was surprisingly faithful to our design, despite our not being invovled during implementation for quality assurance.

Visit Morgan Stanley Individual.com.

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