From Outdated to Intuitive:
AccessHolding Website Redesign

2018-2019

AccessHolding wanted to have a more approachable and updated design for their website, with a user friendly interface for their investors, partners, and future employees. The architecture from their previous website was re-envisioned, and I conducted usability tests such as card sorting, paper prototyping, and heuristics to ensure the site’s usability would be optimal. We also conducted workshops for the company to understand the process and become a substantial part of it.

The project was divided on 3 stages: Research and Analysis, Concept, and Design and Implementation.

Icon of a designer sitting in front of a computer

My Role

UX Researcher and Designer, UI designer, graphic designer, main Wordpress developer.

icon of a mountain with a flag on the top

The Challenges

Balancing the new approach on identity perception without losing familiarity with previous clients, as well as condensing the vast amount of information previously displayed on their website.

The Results

A completely redesigned, less cluttered website that also provides more opportunities to create and share content with clients, partners, and shareholders.

Key Takeaways

Improved navigation clarity by reorganizing the sitemap and refining labels based on user feedback and industry standards.
Introduced a News section that quickly engaged readers with around 84% page engagement and 55% average engagement per story, showing strong early adoption and positive reception.
Maintained brand consistency by balancing a modernized visual language with elements that ensured recognition for existing customers and partners.
Translated stakeholder objectives into structured content that supports both usability and business goals.

The Project

Contextual visualization of various website sections.

Research and Analysis

Since it was a redesign of an existent website, the first step was to see what we had to work with. I recreated the website’s sitemap in order to organize the content, define the links between sections, the way they are grouped, and overall the architecture the website held. I also analyzed its look and feel to see the strengths and weaknesses of both the current architecture and design.

The old website was really text-heavy, and the team wanted to reduce the amount of information and keep texts to a minimum, so we had to figure out what our users were interested in, but we had no website analytics to help us.

Excerpt from the existing (now old) website analysis document.

The team gathered some direct competitors and other financial institutions to create a competitive benchmark of websites in order to search for design patterns, positive features, among others. One of the main goals of this step was to help us define what the most important information sections were, for which I also charted the appearances of each general section on the websites, which gave us a good idea of which ones were a must have.

Excerpt from the competitive benchmark document.

The company had an initiative of sharing what different departments were working on, so we decided to create a series of workshops to teach those who were interested about the redesign process, share our insights, and let people get involved in the process. On our first session, we explained the steps to take in order to redesign a website, gathered feedback on how they felt about the current website (to locate possible pain points), and got the attendees involved in the definition of personas for our future users (and came up with 3: the longstanding partner, the prospective partner, and the job applicant).

Overview of the defined personas.

Workshop activity: defining needs and requirements.

Workshop activity: needs and requirements chart.

Concept

Based on the personas' needs and the most important sections, I created a draft sitemap to be evaluated on our next workshop session. For which we decided on a card sorting to test our proposed structure and nomenclature. The results from the exercise were then used to create a new iteration of the website’s architecture.

Workshop activity: card sorting.

Proposed website architecture.

Once we were pleased with our overall structure, I developed sketches of the main screens, which would then be used as a base for creating wireframes and the final website.

Excerpt of hand-drawn screen sketches.

Design and Implementation

At this stage, we had a clear idea of our new information architecture, and we were ready to start the design of the product. We had a session to define the look & feel, for which we created moodboards and went back to gathering feedback on how people felt about the company to help guide us towards design style. We wanted to have a minimalistic, clean design that felt friendly but still trustworthy.

Overview of a website moodboard.

It was finally time to start the implementation! The team was creating content for the sections we defined previously, and I was implementing the wireframes on our development environment. I was also tasked with creating the icons to be used on the website.

After we had implemented all of the screens, we conducted a heuristics test to validate the design and gathered insights to improve our structure before publishing.

Since going live the first time, we have continued to work together on more additions to the website, to cater even better to AccessHolding’s partners and clients.