Australian Stock Exchange
ASX Home page
The Australian Stock Exchange's site is one of the most heavily used in Australia. Their previous site, also designed by Hiser, had outgrown its structure with a great deal of additional content and functionality.
The ASX engaged us to redesign their site, to:
- improve navigation for customers, in a structure suited to future growth and change
- focus on market trading and sharemarket education, while promoting key ASX products and services.
Multiple usability challenges
We set out to solve numerous design and usability problems and to take the project team and wider group of stakeholders with us on the redesign journey.- Information on the site had become very difficult to find because of the narrow and general nature of the high-level navigation categories. We dedicated a significant chunk of design time to re-structuring the content (to solve these IA issues) and testing customers' understandings of different labels and where they expected to find certain topics within the site.
- New features were added to match the investor's mental model and typical activities. For example, the "Browse Top Companies" feature, which reminds users of "flicking through" the share price section of the newspaper.
- Pathways to key functions, such as share price look-ups and company research, had become overgrown and confused. We radically simplified these in terms of access and consistency of results.
Significant services and revenue earners such as education classes had very low visibility and were hard to find.
We surfaced these services by ensuring that:
- pages covering investment types (shares, options etc) always promoted the education classes to match
- people did not need to log in to see this information
- the information is immediately acessible via the Home page.
Familiar stakeholder challenges
Adopting a new graphical look and feel for a site can be a process fraught with political tension. We like to collaborate with stakeholders to understand objections and reach effective design decisions without resorting to compromise solutions that average out competing views, yet please no-one.
Working closely with the ASX project team, we were able to shepherd new visual branding concepts through the stakeholder consultation and sign-off process in record time after refining several concepts.
Works for customers and displays wares effectively
The Home page and site navigation now focus on market data and practical activity. The site now looks and functions more like a typical stock exchange site.
All business areas are more visible through the menus. Key services are integrated, gaining exposure through customers' everyday tasks, and ASX's role within the investment community is made much clearer.
In usability tests, customers responded very positively to the ease of exploration and navigation of the site, and to the more immediate communication of market activity and improved access to stock information.
