At Russell Investments, my role was to help build, layout and transfer their existing AU and NZ sites onto the Sitecore CMS. Afterwards I was managing these website’s ongoing content production and UX and visual design.
Russell Investments
My ongoing role involved managing creative briefs with various stakeholders across the business, digital design,front-end development, email design and development, as well as project management of their off shore web production team.
As one of only two designers in the Asia-Pac region, I was asked to meet with stakeholders to understand their website needs and find a way to transform their initial idea into not just a visually appealing design and imagery for desktop and mobile screens, but also to understand how customers would interact with the pages.
It was important for me in my role to understand what was the overall purpose of the campaign or the landing page, and then to to decide what was the best way to guide the customer to these various goals. As well as creating the visual design, I also needed to plan out the information architecture, call to actions, and where to place the hot spots for customer engagement throughout each page.
In collabration with an external agency, I also helped Russell to design their very first commercial mobile app, which involved much detail in typography, layout and graphs and animations for showing investors their financial returns and possible future returns. It was challenging compressing so much information to small screens yet with the aim of making everything still readable and easily understood by users.
In a sense, I really learned how to perform at my best at Russell Investments as the Front-end developer, UI designer, Project manager and overall Web manager all at once. It was overwhelming at times, but it was invaluable in giving me such a broad range of digital skills. I felt like I really lived and breathed the digital world in almost all aspects of it during my time there.
As well as managing the Sitecore CMS, I used Salesforce Exact Target and Microsoft Click Dimensions to manage all personalised email campaigns
On the development side, we worked in the enterprise CMS Sitecore, which was able to house multiple sites and domains under a single instance. I was therefore often called up to manage, design or build content for China, Korea, New Zealand as well as my regular management of the Australian site. I complimented the CMS with my knowledge of font-end programming, often building my own style sheets for bespoke campaigns, creating mobile responsive infographics or banners, and even building unique forms and financial tools with JS.
Some of my builds included -
- Different financial tools and forms to calculate users superannuation or investment growth over a number of years
- CSS or JS to build visually appealing financial infographics which would be as readable / usable on small screens as well as large
- A lot of custom JS throughout the site to accommodate development issues with different older browsers, to speed up page loading times or simply for different Font-end visual effects which were not OOTB in our CMS instance.
- Custom coding mobile responsive email templates
Russell Investments was a fantastic introduction for me into the world of corporate design and how to create visually appealing UI/UX for a market which may not be one which is so familiar to me. I learned to tone down my design and more often than not use typography, white space, negative space, layout to make the designs appeal to the user in a more subtle way. I also learned how to use User Experience design to guide the customer to the business' desired outcomes and goals.
I also cut my teeth on the coding and development side, working with a senior developer to build and maintain updates throughout the main website. I eventually left Russell to try work outside of the finance space and challenge myself again, but I left with an invaluable design and development discipline that still serves me well to this day.
For more information or examples of my work at Russell Investments, please contact me.
