NerdWallet
Topic Pages
Overview
NerdWallet has 11 business verticals, each with its own plethora of content articles, tools, product reviews, and more. The site lacked a destination for all of each vertical’s resources to exist within. These topic pages gave each business within Nerdwallet a home to showcase its latest and best. See a live example here.
Background
Each NerdWallet vertical has tools, calculators, educational articles, round-ups of the best financial products, and editorial reviews of various financial products. All of these types of resources are overseen by a Category Manager who has the responsibility of making sure his or her vertical’s online presence is maintained.
Problem
Despite a wealth of resources for each vertical, it was difficult to find what you were looking for. Each vertical was using a page template called a “topic hub”, and this template was also being used for sub-topics, meaning there was no clear hierarchy when navigating back and forth from a main vertical to a sub-topic. The pages also had to be flexible enough to accommodate different numbers of resource types.
Discovery
I established the following goals.
Goal A: For each business vertical to have a home for its resources that was a memorable destination for consumers to return to for information.
Goal B: For the maintenance to be painless for Category Managers and content writers, and that 11 different vertical hubs managed by 11 different people still were cohesive.
Goal C: The page for each vertical will be linked to from the new clickable global navigation, so it needs to encompass everything that Nerdwallet offers on a certain vertical.
We needed to establish rules around module types, the order of these modules, and how they would be populated. WordPress can automatically populate them from different sub-categories, or a Category Manager can override this and manually place content. For consistency, I decided some modules should always be pre-populated and some modules should always be hand-selected, all across the board.
Discovery sketches from meetings with the PM and category mangers, understanding their needs and the requirements as well as the users'.
Next, I tried to break down the needs and requirements into module types, after determining the pages would need a modular approach to serve different content, which varied in types and in number among the 11 verticals.
I then moved onto visually brainstorming how these modules would look and be arranged.
Wireframes that I experimented with, settling on the far right solution.
Below is a breakdown of the module types and my rationale for them and their placement. See a live example here.
