Nicholas Pension Consultants is a financial consulting firm specializing in third-party management of pension plans for clients and their employees. The firm is quite successful, and we thought their site, which we came across in our search for new clients, could more accurately convey their expertise, in terms of its experience and design.
When speaking to Nick, a founding member of the firm, he described the website as an “online billboard.” The website clearly was more complex than that, and following this initial exchange, our goal became to refresh the site and propose changes to make it more than just an advertisement. Billboards are simple ads, but a website is a tool. After speaking with the firm’s co-founder, we distilled our initial impressions and discussion into two main goals for our research.
Our objectives:
Make the website experience frictionless and accessible
Incorporate elements of market research to make the website attractive to clients both in terms of usability and emotional “feeling”
The firm’s founding partner viewed the site as a sort of virtual business card, but it was clear from a brief exploration that, being a full-fledged website, there was much more to it than that. To create a cohesive research path, we of course scheduled meetings with firm partners to establish their website’s perceived purpose and their firm’s business goals.
Research methodologies used: User interviews, usability testing, heuristic analysis, competitive analysis
First impressions and notes from a heuristic evaluation
The first question: What is this website for?
Apart from the base-level quality of establishing an online presence, the NPC site featured essential information such as contacts, pay-rates, and information about services. Being that the realm of pensions and investment in general can be confusing, there was also a section devoted to detailed information about specific types of retirement plans and how NPC works with them.
Once we were able to familiarize ourselves with the website, we began a heuristic evaluation to identify standout violations of design standards that could be potential issues for users. Connecting with NPC’s user demographic was our next step.
Who is the website for?
NIcholas Pension Consultants is accountable to clients and partners. These were our user groups. Although we had no budget and limited access to user contacts, my research partner and I managed to conduct a total of four interviews with partners and clients of the firm to source more information. Our semi-structured interviews were guided by our heuristic evaluations and NPC’s company goals. After speaking with clients and partners, we had another point to triangulate from, were able to use insights from these interviews to guide creation of usability tests for novice users. These novice usability tests were important for their potential to support previous insights, and as a source of new information regarding users who are hearing of the company for the first time. Many of NPC’s clients were gained through reference. What this means for the firm is that partners referring potential new clients, and new clients both have interest in the site’s experience.
How can we make the experience better for all users?
We ran those usability tests with five novice study participants who had never seen the site. All were college educated, worked full time in finance and research, and ranged in age from 24 to 52. The usability test was formed from pain-points discovered in our expert interviews and heuristic evaluations, and was fairly structured, allowing the users to interpret tasks and complete them as they saw fit.
Guided novice usability testing of the website's key features
Results
We consolidated our research results into a report and slide deck based on four core issues that were confirmed by two or more sources (heuristic eval, expert interviews, novice usability testing). We found through this process that:
- Users from every demographic perceived the website as “outdated” and impersonal.
- The vast majority of users also felt the company lacked diversity.
Both of these issues had simple remedies. We proposed simple design changes to the site’s styling (minor updates to level NPC with other consulting firms) and photo choice (a full company photo as opposed to a photo of the owners). As for recommendations strictly involving the site’s usability, we had two problems to fix:
- Almost all items in the website’s main menu, when clicked, opened as PDFs instead of individual web pages
- Users were confused by the site’s structure and needed more context and information regarding where the menus were taking them and what each item was for
The website structure is a design choice, and although not "easy", is a simple fix not taking an inordinate amount of development time. The problem of context is one that is also solved by the previous fix: having a dedicated web-page as opposed to an instant PDF redirect allows for instructions, descriptions, and overall a much more information-rich experience that does not leave users stranded. Our design recommendations were taken into account by the firm's leadership and are currently in development at the time of writing.
Wrapped Up
Overall this was a quite pleasant research experience for my partner and I. The firm and their partners were flexible and open to change, and the interviews and usability tests went smoothly. The recommendations we made were data-supported and impactful while remaining low-effort on the development side--I look forward to seeing how the site develops and hearing client response post-update.