US GAM Research & Insights

US Global Asset Management Podcasts Overhaul + QOL Updates

RBC US GAM Institutional website was meant to be a source of information for investors and to get them on board with investing with RBC. It houses multiple forms of information ranging from written to audio and video. By early 2024, they realised that the traffic had stagnated and people weren't sticking around for long plus their push for podcasts wasn't yielding results. As a Senior Designer, I was brought on board to assist.

SERVICE /

DESIGN LEAD

CLIENT /

RBC GAM US

Intro

That... Doesn't Look Like a Podcast

Mid 2024, the RBC US GAM team reached out to the head of my design department asking for assistance with one of their investor facing websites. This was odd as we only worked for the Canadian side but they had known of our team and wanted us to be involved. They were noticing a stagnation in the amount of people coming to the site and the amount who were actually sticking around were dropping too which was concerning as this was a news site for investors, informing them about the market and current status of certain investments. To boost the numbers, they were also focusing on their podcasts division as they were all the rage in 2023 and coming into 2024. However, it wasn't working and they wanted me to figure out why.

Then I looked at the podcasts and I knew what the problem was...

The problem was evident as an avid podcast listener, the player acted as video player for an audio only medium. There were also no hallmarks of a good podcast player like skip and rewind by x seconds. There were also some more problems I will discuss in the next section.

Planning

Identifying the Problems

I divided the issues I spotted into 2 categories, first being the podcast specific problems and second the site-wide labeling of info and missing contextual info about the articles, videos and podcasts that would encourage users to click on them.

Podcast Issues

Player that isn't user friendly or familiar to podcast listeners
Transcripts that lead to a new page
No info about podcast length
No links to external podcast players for the user's convinience
No way to follow the podcast creator to keep up with new episodes

Research and Insights Issues

The categories for the articles, videos and podcasts don't actually tell users what they are
No info about the length of the videos, podcasts or read times to convince users to click
Podcasts aren't marketed in anyway to let users know they exist

Redesigns

Podcasts

Improved Player

Brand new player! Has controls a podcast listener expects!
- Skip and rewind
- Playback speed
- Ability to download for offline listen
Useful info for people to scan in case they weren't going to listen, this way they stay and read summaries
Speaker profiles for people to follow their other works

Improved transcript viewer which doesn't
Links for external platform so people can listen on their preferred platform rather than not listening
Ability to subscribe to the different podcast channels

Podcast Homepage

A new homepage to access all the podcasts on RBC US GAM
Summaries along with listen time to help with picking the perfect episode to listen to
Ability to subscribe to the different podcast channels

Research & Insights +

A new homepage to access all the podcasts on RBC US GAM
Summaries along with listen time to help with picking the perfect episode to listen to
Future plan to add read times to articles (It has been added to the live site)

To market the new podcasts, there was temporary section on the hompage to advertise the podcasts
They also had all the info from podcast info cards from research and insights

Closing Remarks

While not all of the elements of the redesign were implemented on the live site, the important ones like the new player, new transcripts, ability to subscribe, podcast length, read time were added.
This resulted in noticable increase of 20%+ in investor traffic.