Green Finance Initiative
Website for low-carbon investment
Website for low-carbon investment
The Green Finance Initiative is a City of London backed initiative aimed at encouraging investment in low carbon energy sources within the UK economy. After a successful tender application and presentation stage, RGSD partnered with Designppl to lead the UX & visual design of the platform.
To understand the client’s broader aims and objectives for the initiative, we organised and instigated a morning long workshop held at the client’s City of London offices.
Using established methodologies we worked with the client to understand their needs for the platform, create user personas and journeys, identify their target audience and explore essential content and key functionality (IA) for the website.
The data we acquired through the workshop was then summarised and distilled into a report that was shared with the client and helped drive decision making with the prototyping and design of the platform.
I began prototyping key layouts and page templates within the browser, agreeing content hierarchy and the functionality with the client at various review stages. As part of my agile prototyping process I often use Webflow, a design tool that allows me to create prototypes and iterate on them quickly based on client feedback. You can read more about my prototyping process here.
It was crucial to address the key functional requirements early on within the design stage and to understand the way users would move through the site, browsing and searching for key information. Prototyping allowed us to understand these journeys across a variety of devices, most crucially on mobile.
As a newly formed initiative, the Green Finance Initiative did not have a visual identity, so we worked closely with the client to design and deliver a corporate logotype for the platform, as well as brand identity that could be used online as well as offline, on corporate communications.
After the brand identity had been created and a prototype used to refine the strategy and vision of the user experience, we began to work on the user interface of the site. We kept the UI simple and clean assimilating all the elements of the new brand identity into the design such as colour, typography and graphic elements.
Motion featured strongly in the design, adding an extra dimension to the experience using subtle fades and animations, such as on the site header, mobile navigation and search elements.
The Green Finance Initiative site launched in November 2016 and has helped propel the initiative to the forefront of the UKs strategy on renewable energy and climate change.