iShares Content Discovery
In the spring of 2019, BlackRock debuted an updated visual identity for the iShares brand with the help of a design agency I’ve long admired, Turner Duckworth. I worked internally with the iShares design team to extend these visual decisions to their online product.
The focus over my several month contract with iShares was to increase the discoverability of their existing financial education content and build out new destinations for content discovery.
Increasing content discoverability
The iShares team had already done the difficult technical work of starting to categorize their extensive library of content. Now, they needed an elegant solution to bring content tags to their article pages. Integrating new visual elements into an existing page is always a delicate sport, especially on a large corporate site. I worked collaboratively with an agile product manager and a multi-timezone dev team to pave the path for these design changes.
The new rebrand gave us a vibrant palette to utilize. Here are some of the basic building blocks of our tagging system:
Here’s how we integrated tagging into the existing article pages, always making as many design improvements to the overall layout as possible:
The tags channeled users onto a new aggregated page we designed, creating connective tissue between all the articles and eliminating article cul-de-sacs:
New destinations for content discovery
With a contract extension, I got to work on a second interesting content discovery project: creating new content hub destinations. The recently redesigned homepage allowed us to push boundaries for layout and image integration. The design process for these pages relied on thorough wireframing, extensive user-testing of visual prototypes, and collaborating with a content strategist to make sure we tested realistic content. Building out these pages created a whole new set of gateways into iShares’ deep content wells. Here’s what my finished designs looked like:
