Responsive site access for Bessemer Trust clients

Whether it’s using a PC at work, a tablet in the evening on the couch, or a smartphone during commute hours, people expect a great browsing experience. For this project, our goal was to redesign the Bessemer Trust client site—which provides their ultra high-net worth clients online access to their portfolios—so that it reflected Bessemer’s personal and prudent investment management, yet offered a simple, familiar and compelling experience on any device. 

The challenge: Bessemer Trust undertook this project to appeal to a younger generation of investors, but initially wanted us to do little more than resize its components so they could be accessed across devices. Internally, we knew that to be successful a responsive project needs more than just smaller, possibly rearranged modules.

As the project began, I joked with colleagues that the most fun part of the project would be to figure out how to fit dollar figures with that many zeros into a screen the size of a business card. Often in my projects, we don’t have the chance to speak with real users and must try to find proxies. With this project we did speak with real users. When we spoke with clients and watched them use the site—learning how they used the current site, hearing what they’d like to be able to do, seeing where they were confused and how they worked around this— we began to find opportunities (beyond just resizing the screens) to give them the information they wanted in a more straightforward manner while eliminating confusing terminology. Bessemer Trust’s leadership—after hearing reactions to the client site first hand—expanded the project to incorporate our resulting recommendations. And, my teasing about all those zeroes rang true, too. There was a lot of information to fit into such a small screen, but my team learned a lot about responsive tables and taking full advantage of the expanding, collapsing and swiping capabilities of small touch screens.

My role:

• Qualitative research with clients and financial advisors to generate ideas and evaluate the prototype
• Heuristic evaluation
• Competitive audit
• Conceive strategy and translate it into concepts
• Create an interactive prototype
• Work closely with development partner
• Lead the client engagement

The result: Not only are our Bessemer Trust clients excited by the new responsive site (now in the final stages of development), but working with us has empowered them to improve other company web properties.