Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (FRBP)

The Client

The FRBP is one of the 12 Federal Reserve banks, located in the 9th district. They came to us for strategy & a website redesign to showcase their initiatives & resources.

The Challenge

Most people don't know the full scope of what the FRBP does. The folks at the bank are passionate, but through our stakeholder interviews we realized that their missions seemed department specific. On the other side, we had to determine how to add value to existing users while educating the greater public about the bank's role. Our goal was to provide access to all different types of users, while giving the FRBP a unified and clear voice.

My Role

Information Architect & Lead UX Designer

Team

I worked with two fantastic visual designers, Sarah Privitera and Michelle Maione, and an experience strategist, Colin Owens.

Initial research

We conducted interviews with 40+ employees at the FRBP, and 19 users. Our user interviews ranged from directors at local non-profits to congressional staffers to bank presidents. People working at the bank are interested in creating impact, and folks coming to the website are largely interested in finding something specific or engaging with the FRBP in a collaborative way.

I also conducted a heuristic review of the site to better understand the users' feedback and the client's content needs, & created user flows.

Concept & Page Development

I wireframed out most of the site and collaborated often with my creative director, visual design team, content strategist, and developers. Although the site is relatively flat (no user logins, no cart checkout), the difference in content & levels of engagement across different areas created a need for flexible components.

I was lucky enough to work closely with the visual designers on my project, and help troubleshoot UX problems that came up in the process of creating the design system & detailed designs for pages. We organized the design system in sketch & used those building blocks on all the pages.

Lessons Learned

The opportunity to directly collaborate with front end developers, back end developers, and my QA team taught me a lot about how many small design decisions can have a huge impact on development. Seeing the work from the initial strategy phase through development was a great opportunity to get to know the client and design with insight.