Coming from a company that carries out a lot of user testing, I was interested to read this article, passed on by my  colleague Sara.

It’s about the departure of a top designer at Google, who claims that the way they develop their sites – by using data about how customers use the  site – limits the freedom of the designers. But surely this is a sensible way to develop a site like Google?

Looking to users for direction, not only on design but also on site development has proven to be pretty useful for us.

When we’re building a new section of the site (or even a new brand), it’s more a question of presenting users with ideas and getting their thoughts (although aware that sometimes what they say they would do and what they actually do can be two different things!) before we start thinking about what we need and this gives a good idea of the key points that we need to prioritise.

Then, as we develop the ideas on how the site/brand is going to look, we test our ideas with them and use their feedback to improve and refine the journey.

The challenge with developing any new work on a website is balancing the user feedback and requirements with the business owners who have their own reasons and objectives for that piece of work.

Working out what is actually possible technically and within timeframes also impacts the work.  So part of the process is finding some middle ground which satisfies all stakeholders.

Once the finalised version of the part of the site we’re working on is built and live, we look at the activity and continue making tweaks in order to optimise it. For example, if conversion drops on a certain page, we can change the order of the pages or amend the information or layout of the page to see if that affects activity.

As far as design is concerned therefore, as the designers are involved at every stage of this process they are able to use their skill, guided by all sets of stakeholders, to produce a design that’s going to help the site do what it needs to do.

So the aim is to use design alongside all of the other elements of the site to make it a success  – for us it’s an integral part of the site development process that is guided by a large number of factors, but customer activity and feedback is one of the most important.

The Motley Fool used to comprise a mixture of personal finance and investing content. It was decided to separate this content into two specific sites – investing would be the main area of focus for The Fool and personal finance would be the main offering from the other site.

Initially, the challenge for us was to develop a new name and brand for the new site – I’ve written some details about how we did this here.

We also needed to communicate the change to our users and here is how we did it.

By the time we needed to begin communication, we had already put up a temporary site in order to build link equity and it looked like this:

As you can see, it was pretty basic, but featured comparison tables – Lena’s speciality, which are key to the site in terms of revenue and article churn, which contributed to the freshly updated content that Google loves. Carl also started a blog which added a nice human touch to the site.

On The Fool site, meanwhile, the messaging was done through the About Us section:

Emails also went out to our customers explaining the change.

A few weeks later, we moved to the second phase of the change. This involved changing some areas on The Fool site to incorporate the lovemoney.com site and make it clear to customers that lovemoney.com is the new offering from The Fool, whilst emphasising the differences in focus.

Here’s what the homepage looked like before:

…and here’s what the homepage looked like once the details about the new site had been added:

As you can see the homepage gives significant focus to the new site, which is all part of the signposting and managing user expectations. There were also tool tips, written by Sara, which floated above the article titles on hover over, explaining that they were being sent to a different site.

The About Us page was also updated to outline the forthcoming changes:

Then the next step was the launch of lovemoney.com. For this, we built a new site in the background which featured all the bits from the original lovemoney.com site plus a registration box for people interested to learn more about the new features, new navigation including a top bar for comparing products and extra bits like home and car insurance. This is what it looked like:

Then, on April 1st, it blossomed into the current green and luscious looking site. Profiling details, comments on articles and Q&A were also added to this release:

Of course the grass/growing concept is related to the ‘nurturing’ philosphy behind lovemoney.com.

I think a nice ‘paradise’ background would also look good as paradise is probably quite a nurturing place.

Since taking part in the project to create a brand, I thought I’d take some time to write about the process that we went through to end up with a sparkly new brand.

Why did we need a new brand?

Here’s a bit of background to place it in context. The Motley Fool is a personal finance and investing site. To reflect the demand in the market, it was decided that the areas of the site should be separated out into personal finance and investing content. The Fool would keep the investing side of the business and the new company would feature the personal finance side.

So the challenge began with the quest for a name for the new company. The process that I’m about to describe took about 3 months just to give an idea of timelines.

Once we found a name, we’d need to create a logo and the website and then the other things that follow in from this like the brand guidelines. We had an idea of what the new brand would stand for and used these as a starting point for this piece of work. Obviously there is a lot of detail related to our brand values, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll summarise them here. The brand values are focused around helping people learn about money management through articles by and advice from our experts – so helping them learn, encouraging interaction between community members – sharing information, and helping people get better at managing their money – improve.

The name

We began with the name and involved everyone in the company was invited to a brainstorm where we thought about names that reflected the brand and what the company did. The names were split into three main areas, aspirational, functional and a combination of those two categories. The brainstorm resulted in a list of hundreds of names. Then the names were ranked in order to narrow them down to a short list. This shortlist was then narrowed down further as we needed to see which domains were already taken. So there was a shortlist of names and these were tested with the public and we got a final shortlist of 4 names.

It was these names that we needed to test further. So, we thought about how each of the name could represent the brand and brainstormed some ideas for a logo for each of them. Karen our fabulous designer came up with 4 executions of each logo and we spot tested the executions in order to end up with a  final shortlist of 4 logos.

Once we had the 4 logos, we needed to do some user testing of the logos. So we created some boards to put the logos in context.

Project Boom

Money Map

Love Money

Sort it Out

Due to the fact that Money Map was registered to another company, the decision to select ‘Love Money’ as the new name for the company was one that we didn’t need to make!

The logo

So now that we had a name, we needed to think about what the logo would look like – the logo that we had come up with previously had been just one of a range of possibilites.

After more brainstorming and research, our great designers Ben and Karen came up with  shortlist of 7 possibilites

Following more spot testing, this was narrowed down to 3 possible versions. These were displayed in the office and everyone was asked to vote on the preferred option.

 The logo that was eventually selected was the final one in the list above. So this option was polished up and resulted in the final logo you can see at the top of this post. Hooray!

At work, we are currently in the process of separating out our offering and it’s been really interesting to see how it’s been communicated out to our customers. On the new site that is being launched, there’s a blog which has detailed the stages of the site launch. It creates an informal commentary of what’s going on when the nature of the work means that it’s ongoing and difficult to pinpoint a time when it’s ‘complete’. So customers get reassured and accustomed to the change in plenty of time.