Institutional Investor Journals http://www.iijournals.com/

Challenge
When Institutional Investor Journals (IIJ), a leading publisher of financial journals, found their subscribers were clamoring for a site redesign, they tapped us for the job. Their users had difficulty navigating through the site, and were demanding more robust tools and features to assist them with research. We also discovered that the IIJ site was not optimized to take advantage of the wealth of technologies available to journal publishers, and that their brand did not properly leverage their most valuable assets: their world-class contributing analysts and authors.

Solution
Our first course of action was to reinvent the IIJ brand and position it accurately, as a progressive and innovative thought leader in financial publishing. We partnered with the Communication Strategy Group on a branding exercise that included user interviews, competitive analysis, brand persona, positioning and guidelines. We created a new tagline, "The Voices of Influence", which leveraged both IIJ's leadership status and the strengths of their superstar contributors, and redesigned the logo.

With our new brand and user research in hand, we began the website redesign with an extensive information architecture phase, developing over 40 wireframes identifying information flow, content components, website features and navigation schemes. Then we worked closely with industry-leading software, hosting and systems development firm Atypon Systems, providing them with information architecture, visual designs, flash animation and front-end coding as they built the backend technology and content management system. The result was an intuitively navigable, fully optimized, brand-aligned site that serves IIJ subscribers with tools and functionalities they need.

We continue to help IIJ grow their brand by assisting with their online marketing and journal cover design, in addition to overall site maintenance and updates.