Case Study:Edward Jones – edwardjones.com

Stack: Sketch | Figma

A collage of the starting and ending screens of the Edward Jones Starting Point quiz experience.

In 2019, the need for an updated public web presence coupled with an expiring content management system (CMS) license prompted the Edward Jones Marketing department to launch an effort to replace the firm's primary lead generation mechanism, edwardjones.com, and the SDL Tridion CMS on which it was built. While responsible day-to-day for developing all marketing campaign pages and non-templated front end code for the website, I was asked to also serve as a front end consultant for a substantial and months-long Request For Proposal (RFP) process to identify a new CMS, as well as a partner agency to run point on implementing a redesigned experience in the new CMS.

After meeting with representatives for several enterprise CMS vendors, our voting committee narrowed our choices to Adobe Experience Manager and Acquia, ultimately deciding to move forward with Acquia.

With the selection of a CMS vendor determined, the RFP committee next met with over a half-dozen agencies with proven track records of implementing enterprise web applications with Acquia's Drupal CMS, ultimately selecting Publicis Sapient as our partner.

Over the next year-plus, I partnered with fellow Edward Jones and Publicis Sapient designers and UX researchers to redesign the web experience, advising on information architecture and incorporating new Edward Jones Brand standards as well as guidance from the AXIOM design system, in order to satisfy requirements from a multitude of stakeholders, from Marketing, to Legal and Compliance, to those representing the firm's 19,000 Financial Advisors and their branch support teams. Features included the home page, financial advisor profile pages, and the financial advisor locator.

Following the 2021 relaunch of edwardjones.com, I moved into a Front End and UX Design consultant role on the website, shepherding UX and product design work from agency deseigners and mentoring junior agency developers, advising on how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to achieve design and accessibility requirements (e.g. container queries for layout, and HighCharts for data visualizations) by means of functional in-browser prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

List and map views of results following a search with the financial advisor locator. — List and map views of results following a search with the financial advisor locator on edwardjones.com.

Visit the live site: edwardjones.com