Nationwide Financial Menu: Card Sort & Moderated Interviews
Challenge:
Nationwide wanted to ensure the site’s labeling system aligned with how financial professionals search for information and products. Ogilvy aimed to improve the overall navigation experience to increase usability, content discoverability, and the financial professional’s engagement
Specifically, assessing the clarity of the category title “Business Solutions”, and to what extent it aligns with users’ understanding and expectations of the content it represents.
Strategy:
30 financial professionals participated in an unmoderated closed card sort, organizing 23 content-related items into predefined categories that made sense to them. Our goal was to uncover mental models and placement preferences.
Post-sort, participants were asked to interpret labels like “Business Solutions,” “Topics,” and “Support” and provide alternative naming suggestions.
Concurrently, we conducted 10 moderated interviews using a blind prototype. Participants were asked to explain past motivations for visiting the site, analyze current category groupings, and category labels.
Critical Insights
"Business Solutions” lacks clarity: Financial professionals want insights tied directly to their specific Lever pages and target audiences.
“Topics” = Thought Leadership: Users consistently understood this to mean insights, market trends, and educational content.
Locked content isn’t a barrier: Users expect to log in to access materials and are not deterred by locked forms.
Securities-backed Lending belongs under Investments: It was frequently grouped with mutual funds and ETFs.
"Support" is confusing: Users expect a place to contact someone for issues with the website, not a static business resource section.
Impact
Nationwide used these findings to overhaul their website’s navigation and menu labeling. Recommendations include:
Renaming “Business Solution” to “Employee Benefits”
Moving “Why Us” to a standalone tab and optimizing search paths based on user intent.
The research has also informed ongoing personalization efforts to tailor experiences based on login status and user motivation. Findings are being integrated into internal documentation for ongoing digital strategy refinement.
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