This project was the full redesign of the Stock Plan side of the business. The products tend to get very complex and detailed so this was a great data display exercise.

In addition to supporting U.S. Currencies, the final design also needed to support native currencies for international customers. The final product brings a lot more information forward to the customer, minimizing clicks and making the path to other items like tax documents a lot clearer.

The users

- The employee: these users are recipients of various type of stock awards. Their financial experience can range from expert to novice, with many being first time users upon grant award

- The employer - E*TRADE provides employee stock plan services to a vast array of the S&P 500. The employers need a foolproof platform to serve their employees and act as a record keeper for a complex and regulated product.

The need:

Employee stock plans are notoriously complex financial products that need to serve a diverse audience - from a CEO to a warehouse worker and anyone in between.

Prior iterations of the site were layered and difficult to manage - and didn’t really take into account what users were most interested in, what their visit frequency was, and what level of detail was required to be available for all customers.

The enhancements

- We listened to the users and made key information points clearly available - account value, holdings and vesting.
- Enhanced tax features like realized gains and losses, access to trade history
- Key contextual action menus and information bubble to the surface - allowing users to trade, get info, view alerts, sort, without getting lost deeper in the site

Vanare represents a wonderful challenge in the financial services space and a great departure from a lot of the retail brands I've worked with.

The need

As a user, I need an end to end platform that will allow me to onboard new customers, migrate existing ones, manage the accounts for all my customers, and grow my business on an ongoing basis.

The users

Financial Advisors - these users are managing client bases from 1 to 500+. Their connection to their clients is what defines their business. They deal with a great deal of volume so they are always looking for ways to both simplify how they run and, more importantly, grow their business.

Large Financial Institutions and Brokerage houses - These users have a client base of Financial Advisors who require a CRM platform to maintain their own clients. They often use out of the box CRM platforms that are limited or expensive to customize. They sometimes use home-grown platforms which are equally expensive to maintain and are usually not scalable - so they sometimes find themselves stuck in a legacy experience that difficult to migrate out of.

The solution(s)

The Vanare platform is truly end to end. The experience I worked on was focused heavily on large-scale migration and simplifies pretty much every aspect of the CRM experience - onboarding, migration, account maintenance (which is particularly robust), projection, communication, proposals.

Home page concept work for a venture capital themed networking site. All the charts and graphics were built from scratch and the page was developed to work within a responsive framework. The entire project was produced with a 24 hour turnaround.

The need:

Create a compelling front-door experience that clearly outlines the benefit of the network Axial provides, and the unique opportunity within the U.S. Marketplace.

The users:

- The “Seekers” - buyers and venture capital providers looking for innovative and successful business opportunities.

- The “Innovators” - startups with incredible ideas seeking capital to drive their ideas and products.

The enhancements:

The front door was designed with a “pitch deck” theme - document the problem succinctly and tell a compelling story about how this organization is consistently solving it.

- Creation of compelling mini-infographics that document the opportunities within the market, paying particular attention to the quick “pitch deck” clarity required for decision makers.

- Quick and clear documentation of the organization’s successes and superior retention rates.

- Provide access to case studies documenting success stories.

- Contextual lead capture at key inflection points.

The need
As a user, I want access to timely, relevant information across all media about the markets, and in particular any data that could potential impact my own holdings

Our users fell into three core categories:
1. The “buy and hold” - these users maintain relatively long positions and don’t frequently check in. They will temperature check occasionally - so its important that relevant data is available with an extremely low learning curve.

2. The “active trader” - these users live and die on information. They trade frequently and rely heavily in timely data. They look for easy, repetitive paths to information and often customize and filter to make their experience more relevant to their needs. They are not great in number but they are super users - and are the 10% that generate a disproportionate amount of trades.

3. The “data miners” - these users seek out news and information to create long term plans. They dig into the details of relevant equities in addition to the news.

The enhancements:

- Introduction of curated news and videos specific to the user’s portfolio holdings

- Contextual presentation of stock, optional and mutual fund quotes presented with relevant news media, charts, and related topics. Also designed consistent search capability with quoting engine to minimize learning curve. Introduction of social media stats was particularly useful as most users look to social norming to gauge importance and timeliness of a particular topic.

- Rearchitected access to historical news and data

Over a period of ten years, I've participated in several redesigns of etrade.com, building specifically for prospect acquisition and customer upsell/cross sell.

The need
As a user, i need information - and in many cases direction - about various investing products, research, and tools to maximize my financial life.

The users
Prospects - this is an incredibly varied user base, from financially saavy to little or no investing experience. The ages range as well - and the products and solutions they seek will often be driven by that age.

Customer prospects - this is the existing base of E*TRADE customers that are looking to expand their knowledge, or are kicking the tires for new products.

The enhancements

Much of my work has been ongoing testing, revisions, and retesting. For this latest round, I redesigned the site templates for full integration within a content management system -which included troubleshooting the key integration points and making on-the-fly adjustments to meet some aggressive deadlines.

Redesign of the navigation, including persistent login and quoting, to accommodate a tremendous depth of products, education, and research.

We also needed to design the templates to easily translate into our eventual migration into a responsive framework.

I see email as the unsung hero of direct response. In the past two years I've spent a great deal of time developing creative and templates specific for a mobile audience. The real trick was designing templates that could easily be built but retain a sense of individuality and creativity, avoiding a "cookie cutter" look. The latest redesign resulted in double digit response rates and a significant increase in conversions.

One of the benefits of working with E*TRADE is it's diversity. I've had the opportunity to develop all manner of collateral and signage for use across all of E*TRADE's branch network and corporate offices.

APMEX is a great example of an open-minded client who let me run with some great ideas. Although I integrated beautiful product imagery into a lot of my work, I also tried to push the boundaries a bit, building out several infographics to communicate the value propositions of precious metal investing instead of relying solely on photography.

Over the years, I've been lucky enough to design hundreds of communication pieces for every line of business at E*TRADE. The audiences range from retail brokerage to B to B to event-based creative. 

Despite 15+ years experience in retail brokerage, working with Trading Analysis and Todd Gordon was a opportunity to learn more about some specific aspects of technical trading. In addition to various marketing and lead capture components, I also worked on some of TA's trading functionality.