THE RICH INVESTOR’S CLUB REBRAND STRATEGY

User Experience | Strategy | Architecture | Team Leadership | Product Management | Design

Organization: Charles Street Research (CSR)

Client: The Rich Investor’s Club, Adam O’Dell
What: The Rich Investor’s Club Membership Site Redesign
Role: Product Owner, Design Director, Development Coordinator
Goal: Create an interactive website redesign strategy that would establish product value, and encourage users to purchase higher-end service offerings.
Stakeholders Involved: Executive, Marketing, Content, Design, Development, Customer Service

OVERVIEW

Charles Street Research, and their premiere stock guru Adam O’Dell, were seeking a way to rebrand Adam’s stock strategy and insights membership platform “Green Zone Stocks”. The platform was shifting to the new name Rich Investor’s Club, and Adam was looking for a way to create an interactive space where users could connect with him, his strategies, and other members while generating more conversion into his higher-priced “back end” analysis services.

THE CONSTRAINT: TIME

This project was initially introduced to me and my team in late October of 2019 as a mid-2020 priority, but when the product rebrand schedule was moved up, in mid-December, to launch in early Spring 2020 Charles Street Research executives were determined to launch the MVP platform alongside the new name. I knew we were going to need to move quickly, and not waste any steps.

PART 1: ALIGNING THE TEAMS

DEFINING THE PROBLEM:

In order to keep up with the tight schedule, alignment between all parties involved was critical to maintaining an efficient process and empowering the team’s rapid decision-making. Therefore, the first step was to generate consensus amongst stakeholders on the core need and problem definition that our work was aiming to solve. After a series of initial stakeholder meetings to understand the desires and frustrations of the core stakeholder team (executive, marketing, content writers), my product co-owner partner, and Adam (primary executive stakeholder) worked to define the ultimate purpose of the work.

The Needs Statement, although visually simple, required many iterations to zero in on the exact goal we were working toward, and the core purpose the site served.

DEFINING SUCCESS:

North Star established, defining success measures: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In developing the KPIs, it was important to ensure they speak to the fundamental purpose of the needs statement. Therefore KPIs such as “Boosting New Member Sign-Ups”, while nice to have, were deemed ineffective to the ultimate goal of the Needs Statement for existing members to convert to upsells. Considering, new users would be less likely to convert to more expensive services without previous evidence of their value.

PART 2: EXPERIENCE STRATEGY

UNDERSTANDING THE USER:

Our teams were benefitted from a previously completed set of research, conducted to understand the users commonly engaging with Charles Street Research’s product suite. I developed an assumptive set of target customer personas, these were developed using a mosaic of analytics and marketing data, customer service insights, and census-level population data.

Fig. 1, Identifying the key data points that were contributing to our presumptive personas.

A Note About Validation: Checking Our Assumptions

It is to important to caveat the persona development work was assumptive, and needing validation, which I did by:

1) Workshopping these personas to create an Empathy Map

2) Conducting an Assumptions & Questions analysis and identifying the riskiest assumptions and questions to focus of our personas

3) Developing a survey to (in)validate our assumptions

4) Conducted in-person survey interviews during Charles Street Research’s Irrational Economics Summit, a conference for current and prospective members of CSR’s variety of stock analysis platforms

OUR UNDERSTANDING:

The results of our in-field survey netted some key observations:

  • Contrary to our assumptions, the majority of members rated their investment skills as Low or Intermediate.

  • Members were less concerned (as previously assumed) with creating a nest-egg, and more focused on improving immediate cash flow through their investment.

  • The desire for more “hand-holding” and guidance in the investment process was needed.

  • Members were also looking for ways to separate themselves from other investors.

  • There was a lot of frustration in particular in finding impactful resources, “I feel like I spend most of my time drilling down through a lot of noise to find what I’m looking for”, said one participant.

  • Members were also generally drawn to the CSR stock gurus and enjoyed connecting with their fellow investors in a real way.

These responses gave us a great perspective of the mental models and thought processes of our users as they engaged with our products.

IDENTIFYING PAIN POINTS:

With a sense of focus for the business goal and the user’s objectives, we began examining the existing journey, to extract pain points and areas of opportunity.

Top Pain Points:

For logged-in users, the journey uncovered clear gaps and opportunities for improvement:

Onboarding Support: Once in the system users were generally left to their own devices with little help to understand how to use the site.

Guidance: For stock analysis and trade recommendations there was little context to guide the users on how to proceed.

Community Support: Whether sharing case studies of other member’s success, or creating a way for members to discuss strategies, there was little in the way of resources to learn from.

Top Pain Points

For logged-out users, the journey revealed opportunities to improve the experience even for prospective members:

Value Definition: With the Home & About pages reading more like hard sell, or marketing bio opposed to value establishment source about product.

Member Sign-Up: There was no way to sign-up even if they wanted to.

Community Validation: Testimonials or historical success sharing could prompt users to subscribe.

PART 3: EXPERIENCE DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE

SETTING THE FOUNDATION:

Staggering development and design efforts were critical in this stage. Due to our tightened deadline, if we were going to stay ahead of plan it would require development happening in tandem with UI design. By developing Priority Guides, a content-first wireframing method, we were able to provide back-end development teams an ERD-level (entity relationship diagram) document for key content types, which allowed them to develop backend structures, while also providing our UX design, front-end development, and content strategy teams components that they could design interface, interactive functionality, branding styles, and content around.

Priority Guides

Priority guides allowed our teams to quickly understand the development needs, experience outcome expectations, interface elements, and content development teams to understand where and what to design. To further support the writing team, we were also able to incorporate voice, and tone suggestions for content.

Additionally, this flexibility allowed collaboration between copywriting, marketing, customer service, and UX to brainstorm around a data and human-focused information architecture, navigation, and a user flow for a new how-to journey, providing self-paced guidance to members.

PART 4: UI DESIGN, BRANDING

EXECUTING THE PLAN:

The beauty about this process was that it allowed everyone involved to quickly, and capably execute, with full understanding of their role, clarity of expectations, and a diverse group of collaborators who brought unique ideas on features, integrations, interface components, and content to improve the overall user experience. For the design execution, the priority guide allowed an important balance between structural clarity and creative freedom.

Design Execution

The priority guide being designed in collaboration with my team’s UX Designer gave her a clear understanding of the structural layout components, however, she was also able to explore the visual representation in a rather elegant manner.

We used a style tile to show the core design styles, with examples of individual elements, larger design components, and style patterns to express both the brand style guide, and the interface styling.

Meanwhile, development, having approved the feasibility of the structure from the priority guides, was able to build with confidence.

PART 5: PROJECT WRAP

CUT SHORT:

I must say, this project holds a special place in my heart, it was one where the team collaboration, coordination, and cohesiveness throughout was pleasing, one that I truly treasured being part of. In fact, the team was so invigorated, many of them expressed similar feelings about not only the efficiency, and collaboration, but the quality of the work, as well.

However, due to the pandemic, and other factors, CSR sold its key properties pivoting its business model, resulting in this project being cut short before launch.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Incorporating development teams early and often creates understanding and sparks innovation.

  • Taking the time to validate what you know about your user is a powerful way to enable teams to act fast.

  • Working to establish consensus first and foremost with executive stakeholders cannot be shortchanged.

  • Not everyone needs to be in every conversation, ensuring the right people are in the room does not amount to exclusion, but helps reduce confusion and enable action.

  • Ensure your North Start is visible, simple, and referenced often.