Our team of two UX designers was tasked with providing a set of recommendations for improving the value and readability of the IMF Annual Report implementing the best practices of user experience design research.

Client

Our client the International Monetary Fund is currently working on rediscovering its brand and looking at their annual report as a tool to increase its web-traffic and recognition of the brand.

• How visually appealing is the IMF Annual Report landing page?

• What attracts the user’s attention on the page?

• How does text and formatting help to engage users?

In addition to thoughts about visuals and layout, I felt we needed more information to get a full understanding of the situation. The following questions needed to be answered:

• How much effort does it take the user to navigate to different sections of the report?

• How fast can users find the information they need?

• How does the IMF annual report compare to other reports?

Research

We started our research online to get a grip on what makes a great annual report.

Competitive Analysis

Going through the reports and viewing the best examples of annual reports we found out that the best rated annual reports consist of the following elements:

• Graphs and visuals to tell a story without using a lot of texts

• Interactive media (videos, animations, and GIFs) to engage a user

• Should be shareable through social media and email platforms

• User should be able to download a PDF-version

• Photography helps user to relate and creates a personalized experience

• Storytelling format guides a user through the report

• Separated sections that allow readers to move around the report

• Impact statement shows people the work the company puts into the better future

• Place for feedback — to show the user the company is easily reachable

  Using those heuristics we compared the IMF annual report with Annual Reports of its direct and indirect competitors.

After the comparison was completed, we analyzed the results and visualized them using charts.

The analysis’ results show that the IMF has the least requirements fulfilled comparing to its direct and indirect competitors from Best Annual Reports -comparison page.

Those results show an opportunity for the IMF to improve the readability of the Annual Report. The goal to make the report more valuable and engaging can be achieved by analyzing competitors’ reports and implementing the most effective ones of their practices

Usability Testing

To back up our secondary research and competitive analysis we proceeded to usability testing.

To measure the difference between IMF Annual Report and one of the Best Annual Reports we picked one of the best reports and asked users to perform the same tasks on their page. We chose the Girls Who Code Annual Report because it was listed in more that one Best Annual Report list.

Synthesis and Findings

Navigational issues

Call-out boxes were not clickable ●

• The drop-down menu is not easily accessible from PDF pages ●

• Blue navigation box confuses user — they don’t know where it will take them ●

• Logo attracts attention — users try to click on it ●

Formatting issues

• Users don’t like columns on the sides ●

• Uneven alignment on the page confuses the user

• Paragraphs separated by spaces, not by titles — not visually appealing ●

• The blue color of headline associates with a hyperlink and creates frustration ●

Recommendations

After we had all those issues clarified we came up with improvement recommendations:

1. Add consistency in formatting, colors, and fonts

2. Declutter landing page

Suggested Next Steps

Our suggested next steps for the International Monetary Fund would be to create high fidelity mockups implementing our recommendations and to usability test them.