Client: Fidelity eBusiness / Fidelity Investments

The Site: Fidelity’s NetBenefits is a major self-service application that allows employees of a client organization to manage their retirement savings and other company benefits online. It has over 7 million users nationwide. (Tour NetBenefits)

An information architecture (IA) redesign was needed to solve numerous issues with the NetBenefits application. Chief among these were issues with:

•	Navigation. Users were having trouble navigating the site or knowing where to go. This was observed in live site testing of the site with Fidelity customers and their NetBenefit accounts.
•	Communicating the offering. Users were not comprehending the range of functionality available to them.
•	Extensibility. The site had grown cumbersome, and was difficult for the development team to build on.

Enervision's Meryl Enerson acted as Lead Information Architect on this six-month project. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary team, the work carried out for this project included:

•	Identification of the project goals and developing a long-term strategy.
•	Analysis of user issues culled from multiple sources (including Call Centers, client conferences, and Customer Satisfaction surveys).
•	Development of over 70 user scenarios for the site, based on life events and other triggers likely to drive users to the site.
•	Development of a new, user-centered information architecture.

We found that the existing global navigation was confusing to users:

Since the structure was based on "corporate silos," there were too many overlapping categories; users didn't know where to go to see their financial information, for example. A new conceptual model was developed that separated all content into areas as an employee-customer might think of them:

This navigational scheme held up well to internal testing, and variations on the sidebar navigation were then tested in usability labs. Iterative prototypes were tested until Fidelity senior management was confident that the approach warranted a build-out of the multi-million dollar, 18-month development effort.

The first year’s results following the full-scale rollout of NetBenefits (2005) resulted in Customer Satisfaction Ratings over 90% - a 30 point increase from ratings prior to the redesign (2002).

Senior management was greatly pleased at the results of the IA redesign, and at its reception by end-users and clients alike. The NetBenefits is now highly ranked among the top plan sponsor Web sites.

“Users just instinctively know where to go for information,” says Dave Rollert, Vice President of Fidelity eBusiness Design. “Given the fact that senior management initially was very married to the old structure, it’s amazing how everyone now accepts the new design as obviously the right choice. The techniques you used to develop and document the solution really made all the difference.”

Additionally, the technology team found that the IA redesign had resolved the issues with extensibility, and was now straightforward to build on.

“We’ve already been able to accommodate a number of new products that no one had even thought of when the IA was being developed,” says Rollert. “The new information architecture will be extensible for many years of product growth.”

For more information on the NetBenefits redesign, see: Fidelity's Press Release