Situation
In the many years since the last influx of investment in the digital estate, the T. Rowe Price - Individual Investing accrued massive design and technological debt. While the firm utilizes Adobe Experience Manager, it had been almost 4 years since it’s last version update. The digital estate was managed by hand, by very frustrated AEM developers, which blew out scope for any project looking to make an impact.
Task
The Core RISE Team (myself as Content Lead, alongside product owners, designers, and AEM developers) was charged with improving the experience in three ways; first by revisiting the content and flow of the core 15 site pages to increase efficiency, clearly communicate brand value and solve common client frustrations, second by migrating all of these experiences into the upgraded AEM 6.5 platform to enable better management at scale, and third by creating a system of underlying content components to power those experiences.
Action
Working in an agile fashion, the Core Team came together and began with client research to identify the pain and gain points associated with the legacy experience. We met with internal stakeholders to better contextualize the issues, including front-line phone representatives who speak to clients daily. We then moved through a design thinking process, and came up with a Jobs to be Done matrix for each flow, which correlate with targeted user personas. As a content team, we moved then into creating page tables to orchestrate flow between pages and content hierarchies for each. I spearheaded an updated Voice & Tone module for Individual Investing to allow our team to be more conversational with clients. Working with our team of copywriters and AEM developers, we moved from wireframes to high fidelity mock-ups, to the final site being deployed today.
Result
The result is a digital estate that costs less to update, has quicker time-to-market for new experiences, is optimized for SEO and mobile, with greater equity for all clients through WCAG adoption. These changes have had huge impacts on discoverability, working in tandem with other SEO efforts have boosted ranking for the Core 4 (II Homepage, Retirement Home, General Investing Home, Account Types), including moving the Individual Investing Homepage from page 4 to page 1 for crucial SEO terms. We continue to see trends showing increased time on page, deeper scrolling behavior, less false starts and fewer immediate bounces. We’re hearing from front-line teams that the information is easier to read for clients, easier to understand, and therefore even more useful for the phone teams as they could actually refer clients to them.
Based on the results from the core pages, the project has been extended to cover the main 50 pages of the digital estate.
Below: Executive summary of RISE project with detailed content transformation.
