United States Gold Bureau
Demystyfiying Precious Metals Investment
Team:
U.S. Gold Bureau Development Team, U.S. Gold Bureau Product Team, U.S. Gold Bureau Sales Team, U.S. Gold Bureau Marketing Team, & Corra Agency
My Role:
UX Researcher, Project Manager, Marketing and Design
Overview:
The U.S. Gold Bureau hired Corra, an e-commerce agency, to modernize and re-design their whole website. I conducted the UX research and spearheaded the design decisions and discussion for our U.S. Gold Bureau Team. What I focused on was to help bring our sales floor’s investment tactics to our e-commerce site. We wanted our brand to be less like Amazon, and more educational. The old U.S. Gold Bureau website had multiple educational content, however, the informational hierarchy was very un-organized and not easy for for leads to self-educate themselves about precious metals. The sales reps used the website as a guided selling tool, so they knew where to get to the information to properly educate leads. However, if one was to go on the website without a sales rep’s guidance there would be a huge decision paralysis.
Tools:
Affinity mapping
Usability testing
Survey
Heat, click, and scroll mapping
User interviews
Creating Design Libraries
Project Management
Duration:
2 Months of UX Research
3 Months of Design Sprints
Research
Interviews
Qualitative Research
Who Did We Interview?
Sales Reps:
They are experts at winning trust and converting leads to customers. They know the common questions and they know the common objections.
Customers:
Customers know what they want and we’ll be able to understand why they chose us. We’ll also get to know what they didn’t like about us.
What Did We Ask?
What kind of questions do leads ask?
How do you build trust?
Where do you take them to the website?
What are the pain points?
Did you have any prior knowledge of precious metals before us?
Why did you decide to do business with us?
How and how often do you use the website?
What are your pain points?
Heat Maps
Quantitative Research
Home Page
We want to see user behaviors when they first interact with our home page. Where do go and what do they click on?
Landing Pages
We want to see what information interests our users on our landing pages.
Product Pages
We want to see what products are popular. What type of products are users looking for?
Findings
Interviews
Qualitative Research
What We Found From The Interviews
Two Things That Customers Use The Website For:
Learning about diversification (led by the sales reps)
Precious Metals' performances and looking at pricing.
Why Did They Choose Precious Metals?
Protection from the economy
Investment / Performance factors
Why They Are Loyal Customers
We offer a “white glove” service
We also provide various services like
Consultation / Strategizing their portfolio
Buy Back Program (lower risk)
IRA Service
Storage options
Offer products that help with their diversification
Things To Consider:
These customers are people who are sale rep guided. The behaviors of customers who do not talk to sales reps are not known from this qualitative research.
Heat Maps
Quantitative Research
Common Behaviors Across The Pages
Product
The top images and links that were clicked were Gold and Silver products. The feature products carousel and the On Sale links
Performance
Even though the real estate of the links are smaller, a lot of users still clicked on the live prices of Gold and clicked on their account log in for their portfolio tracker.
Services
Users also wanted to understand the services we offer as a company. Like the IRA services, Sell to Us, and Sign In.
Results:
A lot of the heatmaps show that people are interested in the investment value of precious metals. The important factors are pricing, the spot price of gold and silver, and how their investments are performing in their portfolio tracker. They also want to understand services advantages our company has to offer for their investment needs.
Synthesis
“Where do I start?”
Gold is a huge investment and there’s no information guidance on the website like the free consultation on the sales floor.
There are lots of educational materials, but new users do not know where to start. It is information overload. And the reason why the company has overlooked the user experience is because they have heavily relied on sales representatives to educate leads and prospects on the phone. The sales representatives tell users what links to click on to start their guided selling. As times change, people are less likely to pick up their phone and have that conversation. So if a user explores on the website, they will not know where to start.
You can see that from the global navigation, there is already information overload, but no guided experience about what read or get it. In this instance. Less is more.
The Hypothesis
If we highlight the information that sales reps use to convert leads to customers on our website, people will gain a better understanding of the benefits of precious metals, and why they should do business with us.
Customers are coming to us in fear due to market uncertainties, and they are looking for solutions. What we lack is articulating HOW we can be their solution and WHAT we have to offer. Being an eCommerce store for clothes, and products like Amazon is one thing, but selling products that people don’t understand creates a higher barrier to purchase.
If we highlight the information that sales reps use to convert leads to customers on our website, people will gain a better understanding of the benefits of precious metals, and why they should do business with us. This should lead us to higher conversion rates on the website. The less ambiguous we are and, explain how it works, the fewer objections. We need to empower users with strong and clear information to help them make clearer decisions.
Solutions
Designs that Guide
Simplify our Information Hierarchy / Global Navigation
Simplify our Information Hierarchy / Global Navigation
We understood that simplifying and guiding the users to educational content about investing in precious metals would help with their buying decision. We reduced the overwhelming links available on the global navigation.
How Did We Get there?
I interviewed 10 sales representatives and asked to list the top common questions they hear leads ask on the phone. The idea behind this is that if the customers already scoped out our website but still had questions, then the company is doing a poor job of communicating and answering the basic and common questions many users have when it comes precious metals, our company, and how it all works from the website. This would create more barriers for customers to trust our company and decide whether or not investing in precious metals will accomplish their goals and needs.
So highlighting the answers to the very common questions people have about precious metals and our company on our global navigations would improve customer’s understanding and communication about the business and what investing in precious metals mean.
We found out that all the questions categorized into the “How, How, Who, and Why” groups. Creating our information hierarchy based on those categories helped with decision on how we could simplify our resources and links on our global navigation.
However, we couldn’t just forget about the resource links sales representatives used as a guided selling tool while users looked at the website with them.
We needed to plan out where each information would be tucked in. So I drafted several information hierarchal charts. Because we are not changing content on native apps, but changing content on a website, we had to take into consideration SEO impacts. There were drafts that would benefit SEO purposes and some drafts that leaned towards benefiting the user experience. I had to discuss with various stakeholder’s all layers of decisions we had to consider. Several drafts were made to accommodate what was best for the internal users and the external users.
Creating Content
I was chosen to spearhead the UX design and marketing decisions for this website redesign project because of my background in UX design and experience at the company. I was not hired as UX designer for this project, because I was hired to be part of the marketing team at the United States Gold Bureau. That being said, utilizing my UX background and marketing role, I was able to spearhead content and page designs for our new CMS pages. Our global navigation had reduce a lot of links and created a need for new pages that would house similar and organized information on one page. While our development team worked on building out the website with the Corra team I started to draft our content pages in figma utilizing the CMS designs we created with the Corra team. This was our way to stay consistent across various pages and utilize our design systems.
Phase 1: For the launch of our new website was to plan out where all the links from the new global navigation would direct to utilizing the pages we already had built out from the past. This wasn’t the most ideal user experience because the educational content and pages that we had at the moment needed to be optimized. However, trying to make our ambitious deadline made us decide to conquer the project within phases.
Phase 2: This is where I was able to draft our new CMS content and pages according to our new information hierarchy and global navigations. Once the new website launches with our CMS system, the marketing department would be able to create new pages utilizing a page builder platform. We would not have been able to create new content pages while the Corra team were trying to migrate all of the existing CMS pages over to our new website system. So in order to make sure our marketing team was ready to build out new content, we planned out our drafts, copy, and images. We would be ready to execute all the designs once the website was ready to launch.
Creating Consistency through a Design Library
Consistency is one of the 10 usability heuristics of UX Design. It also helps optimize branding and trust. Understanding these principles the Corra team and our internal team built a new and modernized design system. We slightly changed our color palette, font, and rules to our designs so that everything across the website can be consistent.
Our design sprints were dedicated to standardizing all these pages for our website re-design. These were all the portions of each design sprint we had worked on for two months. Each design sprint took 1 -2 weeks to finalize with all of our stakeholders.
Global Navigation
Check out process
CMS
Cart
Home page CMS
PLP (Product Listing Page)
PDP (Product Detail Page)
Order Success Page
Once we had completed all of our design sprint. Our development teams were able to start building the website. We had an ambitious turn around time. The time projected to work on the whole website was October - February. Which is why our design sprints did not include a time frame for usability testing. Most of the UX designs were based on a 1 to 1 scale of what we already had, but with some improvements. Within this deadline, our internal team had to effectively communicate our decisions and determine true MVPs. This is where I had learned the saying “Death by a thousand cuts.” Design changes can truly have no end if there are not priorities and MVP in place. The director of product design reminded me that designs can and always evolve to be better after our big launch.
Results
Please feel free to take a look at the new website design: https://www.usgoldbureau.com/
The website was launched March 2024. We are currently monitoring user engagement time, revenue, and user conversion rates. All of this information can be seen and built out in GA4. When KPIs are finalized I will update this portion of the portfolio.
What I’ve Learned
Creating Design Systems and Branding
I learned the way to unify a brand was to build a Design System and Library. It is a way to unify all assets of any new and old design. Designers wouldn’t have to rebuild buttons every single time. It helps companies to keep consistency across different pages, channels, and images. Using Figma to create a design library helps various designers create within brand standards.
Ownership and Team Decisions
One of the challenges of working with a third-party company to re-design our whole website was to be unified across various internal departments regarding our decisions. At this point, our company didn’t have an established product team. No one truly had ownership of the website like the product manager. The way the website functioned as a tool that affected various departments such as our sales department, product department, and marketing department. We had to meet internally to discuss our thoughts about the new designs. I had the opportunity to lead and set the agendas to our internal design meetings. The meeting involved all of our lead stakeholders from various departments. There were moments where I had to advocate the customer’s experience and also balance the needs of the business. Because the company was mainly reliant of the sales relationship with the clients, the e-commerce experience was not as user-centric. The website was viewed more as a sales tool, which is why the information hierarchy was not organized for a novice in the precious metals industry. Sales representatives already knew which links to click on to guide someone to the information, however precious design was not designed for someone who opted out of a sales call and wanted to explore options for themselves. This was the experience that I had to advocate for to reduce friction and confusion in order for marketing to direct more lead traffic to the website. This involved many internal meetings, listening, and explaining how bringing a user-centered design could help with conversions. If we did not push for a better user experience we would lose potential audiences who prefers purchasing items just through the e-commerce site.
