Bowers & Company is a large privately-held financial planning and consulting firm founded in 1977 with over 24 partners, 20 managers, and even more supervisors. Bowers & Company has an annual revenue of $5 to $25 million.

Project Overview

Some of the partners knew their website was difficult to navigate and were pretty sure that they needed a website redesign but they wanted to convince the other partners. One of the partners requested an audit of their website when I was the Creative Director/UX Designer at an agency called Brand Experience.

My Role

Brand Experience was a design startup that I co-founded in 2018 and unfortunately had to close down during the pandemic. At Brand Experience, we combined user experience design and web development with brand design and digital marketing expertise to offer our clients a one-stop-shop for taking their online presence from zero to hero.

Website UIUX Design
Photography Art Direction & Planning

Current Website Audit & Analysis

Our team took a close look at the Bowers & Company website, search engine presence, and SWOT goals. We also did a competative analysis of the other firms in the financial space, both website UX and traffic numbers from search engines.

We found that their current website’s average pagespeed was about 26.7 seconds. According to Kissmetrics, 47 percent of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds.

We also found that the site navigation was overly-complicated, which calls for re-structuring
and updating to a more intuitive navigation by eliminating unnecessary pages, providing an optimal user experience. According to one study, the ideal website has no more than 3 simple clicks to access anything on the site.

We also shared the following statistics from recent web studies:
57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile
75% of consumers admit to making judgements on a company’s credibility based on the company’s website design

Recommendations & Proposal

In addition to digital marketing strategies outlined by the digital team, I included website and UX recommendations which included monitoring analytics and ongoing user experience design updates to continue to boost engagement and site usability, photography planning & art direction, a revised site map and site IA, client persona demographics and psychographics, as well as production of new graphic assets and implementation.

Overall we found that it made sense to build a new site from scratch rather than work with the old one. A redesign would solve all of the issues found in the audit. We also recommended that the firm partners solicit their loyal clientele for testimonials to be used graphically across the site.

Site Map/New IA

I designed a new site map based on our discovery meetings and my competative analysis.

Look and Feel - 3 Options

I began the design process with trying to get a feel for the visual and brand preferences in the stakeholders minds by making three different above the fold design mockups incorporating different fonts and colors could suit the brand. Each had a slightly different aesthetic, but all were still professional and approachable.

Wireframe Prototype

I built an interactive prototype with basic wireframes in order to present navigation and layout design intentions and to elicit feedback from stakeholders.

Photography Planning & Art Direction

When a Bowers & Company partner asked in a discovery meeting how we could upgrade the visual design of their website, I immediately recommended on site photography. I hired a professional photographer that I had worked with on previous projects and planned a 3 day photoshoot at Bowers offices which included more than 35 team member portraits as well as candids to be used for graphics throughout the site. The photographer and I art directed and composed every shot and I retouched every image and sent the assets to the developer. These need to be hip looking not corporate I agree with them needing to look upbeat.

High Fidelity Mockups

About this time, the Content Specialist and Marketing Manager at Bowers & Company started sending Word docs with copy for the site’s some 100 pages. I built high fidelity mockups for all of the unique page designs for final stakeholder approval before we began the development phase. The new website UI gives the warmth, personal care, and friendliness that only a visit to their office could previously accomplish. The website is also now easier to navigate, user-friendly, on-brand, and ranks higher in search engine results.

Measuring Success

We set up a Google Analytics account and also continued to collect data from SEM Rush for the website. Unfortunately, Brand Experience had to close down during the pandemic and I lost touch with this project shortly after Brand Experience went out of business in 2020.

Josiah holds a Certification in User Experience Design from Massachusetts Institute of Technology