Corporate rebranding of a growing asset management firm.
Middlefield Group has been a quiet staple in the asset management industry for more than four decades. Operating in Canada and the UK, the firm boasts a proven track record of providing investors access to the ever-evolving equity income investing trends.
Middlefield’s leadership group reached out to our design agency for help bringing their company forward with a modernized brand and an online experience to compete with the heavy hitters in the investment industry. Corporate rebranding is one of our core design strengths. For more than two decades, our logo designers have been honing their craft, creating future-forward branding to power our client’s digital marketing for years to come. Crafting a brand new identity for Middlefield was an engaging challenge and the results came together incredibly fast as the executive leadership team bought into our design process from the start.
The art of web design for asset management companies and financial institutions is based on a clean approach focusing on numbers. It’s not a time to get overly creative and try to reinvent the wheel; instead, it’s best to focus on a clear message and easy access to the data that the audience is after.
Every website design and branding project begins with a discovery session to learn more about our client, their audience and their marketing goals. We work with our clients to identify goals and set specific milestones to ensure all stakeholders are on the same page throughout the project. This mutual goal-setting exercise creates the foundation for our design strategy and provides a measuring stick to gauge project success against.
Website Design Goals
- Analytics discovery – a thorough analysis of website analytics data and user behaviour would be collected and studied to identify audience expectations, preferences and technologies used to engage with the website.
- Brand identity design – a creative journey shared by stakeholders and logo designers to craft a modern new brand identity for the firm that represents its ideals, corporate personality and conveys confidence to the viewer.
- Website user-interface design – following the successful completion of the logo design and brand evolution, the new website interface would be hand-crafted to extend the brand and develop a modern design system for all digital assets and communications.
- Custom WordPress development – to bring more flexibility and marketing power to the firm, the website would be built on the world’s most flexible and popular content management system, WordPress.
Search engine optimization – with very little organic traction, a solid SEO strategy would be woven into the design and development process, followed up with live SEO training and support for the marketing team.
The Web Design Process
For more than two decades, our web design agency has crafted custom website design for the financial services industry. Our web designers have the experience and creative skillset to deliver successful results for our clients following our time-tested design process. We kicked off the project with our famous brand questionnaire that is designed to help everyone relax and realize the design process should be fun. The questionnaire helps our designers and web developers understand our client’s corporate culture and internal brand perception and identify key competitors in the industry. The questionnaire exercise quickly draws out the personality and vision necessary to transform our research into hand-made visual design assets.
After completing the kickoff questionnaire, we review the analytics data to better understand and identify hurdles or roadblocks in the existing user journey. Using the historical user data, our designers rethink and restructure the new website UI and user experience to meet the demands and expectations of the audience to reduce friction between the website, the brand and the viewers.
Our UX designers work up the initial wireframes to begin mapping out the new website strategy and demo the prototype for stakeholders to experience the information architecture exercise in context. Crafting detailed wireframes for the new website before considering the new UI design offers a comprehensive look at the information architecture and detailed user journey that is planned for each unique type of page slated for design in the new website.
Wireframing also helps project stakeholders to review and make more educated decisions on the foundation of the new website without the distraction of a high-fidelity website design. Revisions are made within the wireframes much faster, which all but eliminates excessive design revisions that can derail a project. These savings translate into a more efficient project timeline that keeps the project on schedule and on budget.
Using an interactive online prototyping tool, our team presents the UX design to project leaders in a live web-based environment that allows them to mark up the designs with comments and feedback shared by all parties. Including key decision-makers in the UX design process ensures they understand the rationale and purpose for elements within the design and offers them an opportunity to make the most informed decisions at this fundamental stage of the design process.
