Deciding when mobile mattered: a responsive retrofit for Investec Asset Management

Customer background

Investec Asset Management, now Ninety One, is a global investment manager. It aimed to give its customers an “out of the ordinary” experience, which meant planning for their future needs as well as their current ones.

Box UK had already worked with IAM on a comprehensive redesign and rebuild of its digital platform, beginning with an in-depth discovery phase.

That discovery phase is where this story starts.

The challenge

During the original discovery, Box UK looked closely at IAM’s analytics and found that only a very small percentage of its audience visited on mobile. So the decision was made to deprioritise responsive design for that phase of development, and focus instead on adding value across key areas of the site.

Behaviour changes over time. When IAM came back asking where it could improve the online experience, the analytics told a different story: mobile traffic was growing. Addressing it early would help IAM protect its long-term success as more of its customers managed their investments on the move.

The analytics, and Box UK’s experience, pointed to responsive design. But the recommendation still needed validating.

Our approach

Box UK ran a peers, innovators and competitors (PIC) assessment, a strategic review of the landscape around an organisation that highlights opportunities and threats. For IAM, it covered 17 businesses, inside financial services and beyond. The team reviewed their websites in detail, from look and feel and user experience to mobile capabilities and in-page functionality.

The analysis surfaced trends and practices IAM could use to improve its own site, and it supported the recommendation that a responsive site would play a crucial role in IAM’s online experience.

With the direction confirmed, the UX and design team turned to how the existing site would work on smaller screens.

What we built

To move the existing website onto a responsive framework, Box UK’s UX and design team built a central, shared style guide. It set out how key functionality and interface elements would work on smartphones and tablets, keeping the experience consistent across channels while taking account of the requirements, capabilities and constraints of mobile.

With the style guide signed off, the back end of the platform was connected to the updated front end. That brought IAM’s key services to smaller screens, including its fund tracking tools and its libraries of investor documentation and thought leadership.

The same style guide approach was used to add a new Institute area to the platform, with its own distinctive look and feel.

Delivery

The shared style guide streamlined development. Elements of the front-end design were in place from the very first sprint, and updates were released rapidly throughout the build, so IAM could see the latest changes and give feedback quickly.

In 24 weeks from start to finish, the responsive site was up and running and the Institute area had been integrated into the platform.

The outcome

Investec Asset Management’s customers could now reach fund tracking tools, investor documentation and thought leadership on a wide range of devices, with a consistent experience across all of them. IAM could be confident its standards would hold up as more of its audience moved to mobile.

The signed-off style guide also gave IAM a framework for future development, so new features could be built consistently across screen sizes from the start.

Frequently asked questions