Usability and accessibility consultant (Dec 05 – Mar 06)
The purpose of this project was to implement usability and accessibility enhancements to 2 of the 4 streams that make up Fidelity International's UK web presence.
A detailed report had been produced by a usability/accessibility consultancy following in-depth analysis of the existing website.
My task was to implement those recommendations specified in the report that would have highest impact and could realistically be applied to 500+ pages within a time frame of 6 months.
Responsibilities and tasks
- Prioritise and implement usability and accessibility recommendations that could have most impact
- Work closely with the content team to ensure that the changes made fitted in with department's long term strategy
- Work with Fidelity International's content management system (CMS) - Teamsite - and ensure that any proposed changes would bring the pages more closely into line with the standard templates
- Add relevant content into search engine related fields (title, keywords, description tags)
- Request that the technical development team make enhancements to the templates to ensure that the search engine fields were made compulsory for content editors
- Request changes to the CMS templates to ensure content editors produced more accessible and usable pages
- Unravel or remove non-standard or badly written code
- Re-write page copy to make it more readable for a web audience
- Redesign section starting pages to enhance usability/clickability
- Rework complex nested tables to improve usability
- Remove or consolidate excessive content
- Ensure alt text equivalent for images was applied correctly
- Apply new CSS styles to enhance the readability of ordered and unordered lists throughout the site
- Ensure navigation and heading labeling was meaningful and applied in a consistent manner
- Redesign key sales focused pages following input from the Director of User Experience
- Replace image based page titles with text where possible
- Improve spacing on the pages to ensure that the design principle of 'proximity' was applied, therefore making the pages easier to interpret
- Request that 3rd party content was updated to fit it with new usability and accessibility standards
- Apply a standard approach for the treatment of PDFs
- Ensure consistent design standards were applied throughout the sites
Project result
This project greatly improved the usability and accessibility aspects of Fidelity's UK web presence.
The pages have become far easier to maintain and the volume of copy is more suitable and correctly spaced.
There is good consistency of design and layout throughout the two streams which will greatly help users interact with the site as well as making content creation much more straight forward.
Please note that the home pages of the two streams were not included in the project.
Project site URL's
Fidelity International's web site for the direct investor without a Financial Adviser*
Fidelity International's web site for the direct investor with a Financial Adviser*
* = external site
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