Case study: Janus Henderson’s Fund Your Future
The opportunity and challenge: Redesign a page for individual investors to open new accounts. There’s a huge opportunity to attract new clients by opening accounts, and the challenge is to make investing feel accessible for people who may have little to no investing experience.
The company: Janus Henderson Investors, a global asset manager, actively manages funds for individual, financial professional, and institutional clients across 25 countries.
The business proposal: The company recently reopened investing for individual accounts after several years closed. There’s potential to bring in lucrative new individual clients into the business.
My role: Lead UX designer/researcher producing all designs and multiple rounds of user testing. I collaborated closely with marketing stakeholders who have ownership of the B2C website channel.
Timeframe & Tools
Project kicked off in March 2022 with discovery testing, and final designs went live in July 2022.
Figma (design, competitive analysis, research documentation, prototyping, handoff)
UserTesting.com
CrazyEgg
Miro
Jira
Before redesign: “Open a New Account” page
Prior to kicking off the revamp project, the existing page was fairly bare bones with no visual imagery, no real information architecture or hierarchy. I saw it as a ripe opportunity to rethink the page structure and break out key information visually, to feel more approachable and inviting to novice investors.
After redesign:
Final product
One of my goals with the redesign was to amplify the page’s visual appeal enough to entice new, possibly first-time investors, into learning more about how to choose the right account type and the right fund to match their investing needs and preferences, without feeling overwhelming.
I used our brand colors and iconography, coupled with compelling full-bleed stock imagery and bold font treatments to help bring the page sections to life and to visually convey the differences between accounts.
Taking a step back: Initial project scope.
I met with marketing stakeholders to learn about the company’s history of closing new “direct business channel” aka individual investor accounts during a time period when they chose to focus on financial professional, or “advisor” accounts, instead.
However by 2022, Janus Henderson’s business direction as well as overall investing trends had shifted, which created a prime opportunity to tap into the individual investor market. Redesigning the page detailing how to open new accounts is step one in overhauling the individual client experience with JHI.
Illustration of user testing interactions, highlighting where users are clicking to open a new account.
Pre-design user testing on live site: Before kicking off design work, I set up a user test on UserTesting.com of 7 users (with no prior financial knowledge necessary) to get a sense for current user behavior and engagement on the company’s home page with various entry points to log in or open new accounts, as well as their level of understanding of Janus Henderson’s offerings.
As part of the user test, when users were prompted to click where they thought they would go to “create a new account,” it became clear there was discrepancy between CTAs to “open” a new account vs. “log in” to an account. While most users clicked on the “Account” dropdown in the mega nav, the following clicks were split between users selecting “Log in to your account” vs. “Open a New Account.”
Users mixed on usefulness of current page content
When asked how useful the information on the current “Open a New Account” page was, users rated it anywhere from 3 to 7 on a 7-point scale. Regardless, I knew I could do better than the existing page in motivating users to open new accounts.
Competitive Analysis: Study retail investment sites
Competitive analysis: I checked out a couple dozen other asset management firms’ websites - as well as more tech-savvy, retail-friendly apps and websites targeted to attracting younger, less experienced investors.
The marketing stakeholders I partnered with at Janus Henderson had determined that a Millennial and Gen X demographic with available assets to invest (yet varying levels of knowledge or past investing experience) was a prime audience to be tapped into.
With this goal in mind, I compared other websites that either felt more fresh, modern and appealing vs. old-fashioned, overly complex and cluttered.
Heuristic evaluation: Information architecture is lacking
Page hierarchy issues
Aside from the obvious lack of visual interest, the original “Open a New Account” page crammed a lot of disjointed CTAs into one page. The first CTA to open an account occurs before any of the account options are shown, and next there’s a callout for existing users, when this whole page is intended for new account holders.
Early design iterations: updating content with visuals
Fund Your Future hero: With the help of a consulting agency, the tagline “Fund Your Future” was chosen to be tied to this new business endeavor to attract more individual investors in the desired younger demographic. I started early design ideation using the dark slate hero banner used on other landing pages contrasted with an aspirational type of stock image and short text blocks.
Choose account type: Whereas the original page included copy and links breaking out different types of accounts, there were no visuals attached. I chose to change that by breaking out the various account types into different colored boxes, our company-branded iconography, and scannable bullet points explaining key differences.
Find a Fund: When I had done user testing on the live site, a major theme consistent with almost all users was an expressed “intimidation factor” when it came to how to start investing or the level of knowledge area. When I conducted further user testing on my page designs, it became clear that selecting from dozens of different investment funds was one of the most daunting obstacles to starting to invest.
I sought to address that sense of overwhelm by separating some of Janus Henderson’s featured funds into sortable categories: popular funds, ESG-focused funds, and those with a more diversified portfolio spread.
Branded double exposure imagery for hero
For my next iterations, I went in a different direction for the hero section by making it larger and punchier with short, compelling copy and a new double exposure image, created by a graphic designer.
Because this page was meant to attract a younger and more modern client, I wanted to translate that feeling on the page with high-impact imagery, web-friendly copy, and right amount of information.
For the Find a fund section, I also experimented with implementing an interactive “quiz” to match prospective clients with the funds that may best fit their needs, to make the investing experience feel more tailored to what they wanted.