Financial Publishing Website Design

AE3 Media publish content across four websites. They target consumers interested in money-management and mortgages, as well as mortgage providers and specialist lenders. Beyond their web presence, their awards and events attract attendance from mortgage professionals across the United Kingdom. The footprint they have in the market is considerable. 

The brief was to redesign and rebuild four websites in the AE3 Media catalogue. Two of these are consumer-focussed (Your Money and Your Mortgage), and two are focussed on mortgage professionals (Mortgage Solutions and Specialist Lending Solutions). 

Publishing website design has a lot of considerations. AE3 needed a technically-capable partner, able to integrate a rebuild with a broad set of functionalities. This partner would need to work on ad-tech integrations, engagement and customer data platforms. They needed a team who would take pains to understand all of these platforms and the ways in which they overlap. Therefore, they needed a team capable of mapping out complex flows of data. All of this needed to work seamlessly, providing a first-rate user experience.

Beyond that, the look and feel of the sites needed a refresh. Both the sites themselves and the branding had fallen behind the curve of customer expectation. This was made worse by the intrusive advertising. The new sites needed to feel modern, and properly representative of an authoritative and expert editorial team. 

While the AE3 team weren’t looking for a full overhaul of User Experience (UX), there were some new features which required flows to be designed from scratch. These were outside the normal remit of publishing website design, and were completely bespoke to AE3’s users. 

Mortgage advisors are mandated to complete a certain amount of work towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) every year. One of the ways they can achieve this is by attending AE3-run events, another is engaging with and answering questions on content hosted on the AE3 site. 

Therefore, we needed to design a system which would allow users to log in and, on the basis of their attendance at an event or their successful completion of a content piece’s quiz, see and download a certificate automatically updated on their account. 

The complexities of this system lay in the fact that customer data was held in one platform, whereas the authentication system lay elsewhere. Furthermore, the system which would generate the certificates would have to be bespoke. Therefore, it was necessary to create in-depth UML diagrams of all of the moving parts, while maintaining a focus on the cleanest and most intuitive UX.

UML Diagrams of the Custom User Experience, part of the discovery process.

A branding refresh was required to inject some energy into the tired brands; they needed to be visually engaging and authoritative. As more and more of the mortgage market became technologically-oriented, we needed to look at some of these competitors for inspiration. 

However, we needed to find the balance. While it needed to be engaging, the user-base was broad in its demographics, and in its approach to tech. Therefore, we held a workshop in which we compared different sites. So, we plotted comparisons on different axes from traditional to custom layouts, and from sites with barely visible brands up to maximal brand expressions. From there, we were able to understand the right balance to take with the various AE3 sites, modified for the consumer-focussed sites and the B2B sites alike.

As a publisher whose revenue is driven by audience engagement, AE3 Media rely upon a complex web of integrated systems. These vary from engagement and user management platforms to ad tech providers. 

Because of the criticality of these systems, we had to modify our discovery process. In order to understand these systems, a sandbox environment was built upon the existing site, within which our developers worked to pull apart each of the systems which was working on the site, and to scope out the work which would be needed to implement them on a new site. 

Their consumer-focussed websites, yourmoney.com and yourmortgage.com are now live, and delighting users with their unique browsing experience.