overview

Scotiafunds.com is the online resource to learn about the mutual funds and portfolio solutions that Scotiabank provides to both new and veteran investors.

After interviewing users and the business lines that relied on the website for their daily tasks, I learned and witnessed the website lacked basic functions that competitors had, such as filtering, and had limited information about individual funds. With the way the existing IA was, the overall user experience was disjointed.

There were many touch points important to users of the website, but they were all scattered throughout the website. Some of that information are hidden away and only accessible in the old mega menu, and there were redundant and repeating pages. The solution is to reorganize the IA and consolidate relevant and redundant pages.

goal in mind

Through a discovery session, I learn that ScotiaFunds and many other financial institutions use Data Front to curate, generate, and host all the data of their funds through their API. When the ScotiaFunds website was first created, it was built with the minimum requirements needed to be displayed following regulations (i.e. providing the fund data as a PDF, price, fund objectives, etc.). This revelation was untapped potential for ScotiaFunds.

Within the time and budget restraints of the project, I decided on two design goals: 1) surface information to make the website as powerful and informative as the PDF documents for each individual fund, and 2) create an extensive filter tool to find them. Previously, a large section of the fund pages was manually edited. So in part of surfacing information, it was also making that information dynamic to prevent the possibility of user error or mislabelled values but utilizing the existing API to its full capacity.

fund filter tool

The filter tool gathers all the high touch point areas (learned from the interviews, IA sorting, and tracking data) that were previously scattered throughout the site to one repository, and consequently making it easier to view and compare other funds.

search and reference

One key aspect I worked closely and stressed with the SEO team and developers is to have the filters be a referential, otherwise be “bookmark-able”. This behaviour I learned from super user interviews that in their world of investments and client relationships, they heavily relied on bookmarks to get the daily information they need quickly.

final thoughts

There were a lot of battles fought for this project to keep certain functionalities. The site started off as a humble archive of funds to now a powerful sales tool for financial advisors, commercial bankers, and individual investor by opening up the window of information and transparency.