ARC Ratings Website
UX / UI Design (with Threepipe Reply)
Credit rating company ARC ratings needed a website to showcase their company profile and display their archive of ratings and issuers. With 7 years worth of documents, we had to understand user behaviours of multiple personas to optimise for usability.
The Brief
Despite being an established company within the industry, their previous website consisted mainly of a list PDFs, which was difficult to navigate and use. We completely restructured the website to incorporate information for all the different user groups.
My role within the creative team on this project was to create wireframes and prototypes for the templates used across the site, liaising with the developers and client to complete testing through launch.
User groups and goals
The diagrams below shows the different user groups and the information they would respectively need to access while on the site. This helped determine the site structure that would help all the user groups find the information they need.
Filtering mechanism: helping users find results quickly
At wireframe stage we were particularly focused on displaying the issuers and ratings lists in a user-friendly way. In addition to adding the search function, we also determined the most important information to be displayed on the list before the user clicks into the report. This includes the solicited status, issue, issuer, rating and date. We also defined the filtering mechanism that would allow users to narrow down their criteria. This was informed by the user goals research mentioned in the previous step.
Sectioning off to organise page information
Following the wireframe stage, I took the look and feel defined by the branding team, I applied it across the prototype.
It was important at this stage to prioritise clarity and consistency particularly on media and text heavy pages to create familiarity of the position of information throughout the user’s time on the site.
For example, contacts are always on the right panel and downloads are always in the ARC brand shape.
Maintaining consistency across varying types of content
In order to accommodate for the differences in type of content across the site, we used a number of varying templates. We have kept the visual language across the site consistent to ensure minimal disruption to the user’s experience.
QA and Testing
Working with the client and development team, we tested the site for issues on common devices and browsers. We used Airtable raise tickets to track changes and and prioritise tasks. This was carried from development through launch in sprints to ensure that the content upload process onto the CMS was streamlined for the client.