Overview
The Greenwich Economic Forum is one of the world's premiere conferences for leaders of the global alternative investment industry. Since being founded in 2017, the Greenwich Economic Forum (GEF) has grown from an annual conference in Greenwich, CT to hosting conferences in Miami, FL and Hong Kong. They plan to continue expanding to more cities around the world, therefore, they needed a fresh new website that represents their sophisticated brand, highlights key event information, increases memberships and sponsorships, and most importantly, creates an intuitive user experience.
Project Goals​
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Design a clean and modern website
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Restructure site's navigation and information architecture
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Responsive design for mobile and tablet
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Intuitive and enjoyable user experience
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Increase memberships and sponsors
Research
​The website built back in 2017 had outgrown itself and the overall navigation needed a complete redesign. My client had repeatedly received feedback that their site was out-dated and difficult to navigate, especially for mobile. In fact, the site was virtually impossible to navigate on a mobile devise all together.
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User Feedback
The target users of the site consist of the following:
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Sponsors "Corporate Partners" / potential sponsors
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Members / potential members
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Media outlets
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Admins / Assistants planning events for their team ​
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I believe it's extremely important to gather feedback from users when it comes to any project, however, the client was not too keen on having me speak to their clientele because they are high level executives that don't have much free time. Therefore, I asked a few people in my network to walk though the site pretending they were interested in an event and becoming a member and sponsor. The quotes I pulled out share the key themes that arose from these conversations.
I wasn't able to search the site by conference locations and could only see past events that had taken place, which was a pain to get to.
I was able to find the information I needed, but it took me some time and felt dated.
I was searching for a good while to see how to become a sponsor and finally found a small button on the footer of the site.
Competitive Analysis
The client provided me with a list of their top competitors, specifically highlighting that they wanted to model their site similar to Money2020’s. Before conducting my competitor analysis, I made the assumption that GEF should remove a fair amount of elements from their main navigation to the footer or sub pages as it was cluttered with too much information. I did a side by side comparison of GEF’s and Money 2020’s navigation as well as conducted an element analysis of all competitors' main navigation to help visualize what could be removed from the current site.
The target users had complained about the navigation and only needing core info such as reading about GEF, searching by event location, becoming a sponsor or member, and learning more about upcoming events.
My last step before ideating the new navigation, I reviewed GEF’s user analytics and was able to confirm my assumption that many elements on the navigation had little to no traffic such as news, social links, and past events. I presented my findings to the client and suggested moving these low-traffic items to the footer along with creating a sub menu on the main navigation to highlight the locations (Greenwich, Miami, & Hong Kong).
Navigation Redesign
Before
After
The screenshots provided above illustrate a significant transformation, which I consider one of the critical improvements made during this redesign.
Previously, the main navigation featured a multi-level dropdown menu that was cumbersome and not optimized for various devices. In contrast, the updated design simplifies navigation by highlighting each location on a dedicated submenu bar and replacing the dropdown menu for with a comprehensive page for all events—both upcoming and past. Another key improvement was moving the sponsor and membership buttons into the header to make it as easy as possible for users to inquire about joining the GEF community in order to increase member and sponsor applications (how GEF makes $$$). This streamlined approach allows users to effortlessly find and engage with content that interests them, greatly enhancing overall usability and accessibility.
Event Page Design
The next priority was to focus on the user flows, especially for the event pages. The previous drop down menu was very frustrating to navigate in order to find the correct information. If someone wanted to know all about an event held in Miami of 2022, the user would need to hover over a year to view the events> hover over the event> click on either Agenda, Speakers, or Sponsors. ​
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The new flow allows the use to browse all events, even with the option to filter by location or year, and view all of the information without having to go back.
Memberships & Sponsors
These pages were mostly focused on the UI and written content. Since GEF is not your typical conference where just anyone can purchase a ticket or sponsorship to any events, we needed that to come across extremely clear as this was another common point of confusion for users going to the site for the first time.
