‘The Times’ Money Money Mentor is a new business venture from News UK. The product aims to demystify money for its users through accessible scenarios and storytelling, and a personal financial health check system. The product includes reader stories, Q&A’s with finance experts, guides, product comparison tables, calculator and customisation tool, and a financial service provider rating system.
As the Lead UI Designer, my task was to rethink and rebuild the Money Mentor brand from the ground up. The legacy version of the product was underperforming and lagging behind competitors. The initial brief involved a redesign of the entire platform, setting new standards and re-evaluating user interactions and visuals.
After a rushed launch there was no rationale or design standard within the product, leaving a lack of cohesion across the platform. The lack of UI patterns left most functional aspects of the product feeling decorative, ignoring information and leaving a disjointed experience across the product and social. Designers had been struggling with the limited guidelines and how they reconciled with the perceived user audience, and the actual audience the product was reaching.
Create a rationale, usage standard, and logic in a new brand and the way it's presented. Manage the consistent end-to-end implementation of the brand from the ground up, and create guidelines to accompany this work. Oversee the roll out of the new guidelines and usage standard through the business, onboarding designers and managing there implentation across all channels.
Understanding the landscape
I was lucky enough to have in-depth mission statements, brand proposition and competitor analysis left from the agency that had collaborated with The Times at the inception of Money Mentor. I began by reviewing these existing resources to build a picture of where and who the brands' target market was and the spaces that content was being designed to exist in.
I also conducted interviews within the News UK to build a picture of what the perception was of the initiative within the business. As part of this work, I also took time to interview the teams that were tasked with creating assets for the editorial and managing its presence on various social channels.
Finally, I set up a sample group of users, pulling from active Times members, and adding the target demographic to the pool. I walked these users through the existing brand, conducting flash tests, and following up with semantic differentials to gauge how they perceived the brand at various points of exposure.
It was clear even at the early stages of this work that there was a chasm between the existing brand and its active market and the niche that the product had been launched to fill.
Inception
As follow up, I ran inception with the core product team and key stakeholders. I played back the initial work that had been done by the legacy agency and followed up with the internal and external interviews and focus groups.
Throughout these sessions, my self and team distilled the data into the following pain points that needed addressing:
- Unhelpful page hierarchy and large chunks of info with no structure
- Overall brand felt untrustworthy and childish
- Users where quick to dismiss product as sensationalist or ‘click bait’
- Despite being simpler than competitors, users found the product more complicated
- Target users where not engaging with brand
- Designers where limited by existing brand work
- Lack of brand proposition meant internal stakeholders struggled to articulate the product within News UK
- Editors and Content Managers felt stifled by lack of UI patterns and page variety
- Product didn’t reflect the content and tools
- Primary audience composed of legacy Times users
Workshopping
Subsequently, we ran rapid ideation workshops in a stripped-down google sprint format with the team to address these. I facilitated the team through a series of exercises including competitive analysis, lightning talks, ‘how might we’s, crazy 8s and anonymous input.
These sessions were used to discuss brand direction, Information architecture, content strategy and define the action plan the team and I would use to address both business and user pain points.
Brand Overhaul
I moved forward by creating four branching exploratory routes for the brand. To reconcile feedback with the newly perceived direction of the brand and its identified target market, these were repeatedly tested against previous iterations and competitors.
These routes progressed over several rounds in tandem with improved information architecture and content strategy. At each iteration, I used multiple silos of feedback to achieve an optimal balance of the brand values and reverence to Times heritage.
The result was a fully realised set of brand guidelines and digital usage standards. This was launched across the existing product and marketing channels alongside the new IA and a revamped content system.
Money Mentor is now much better received both within News UK and with users. The implementation of a unified brand has given stakeholders the tools to rationalise the product to C-level investors. Over the course of two quarters, we have been able to start reconciling the product with its target demographic, with brand sentiment and perception aligning much closer with the initial user base Money Mentor was launched to engage. We have also received positive feedback in allowing the teams to ideate new and more varied marketing and brand strategies, with new product expansions planned a quarter ahead of schedule.
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