From Stakeholder Discovery to Homepage Wireframes
A rebrand with no digital foundation to stand on
Western Union Business Solutions was spinning off into a new company, Convera — one of the largest non-bank, B2B cross-border payments companies in the world. But the existing WUBS website hadn't been rebuilt to match, so it carried none of the new brand's clarity or ambition. As lead experience designer on the Ogilvy engagement team, I owned the discovery phase: understanding what the business actually needed from its digital experience before a single wireframe got drawn.
“Every time a user goes to the Convera website, they should learn something new, be delighted, be refreshed.”
14 leadership interviews to align a company that hadn't yet agreed on its own story
I led interviews with 14 leaders across Convera and WUBS — spanning the Chief Transformation Officer, CTO, CCO, VP of Product, Global Head of Digital Marketing, and regional sales leadership — to surface strengths, gaps, and diverging opinions before they became expensive assumptions baked into design.
The goals going in:
- Identify Convera/WUBS strengths and weaknesses, and how to leverage them in the digital experience
- Identify the core messages and stories that should be told on the website
- Gather requirements for the future digital experience
- Assess the current MarTech and technology stack
- Learn about the company's future digital ambitions
Every stakeholder was enthusiastic about change, but their goals for the site conflicted — until one thread pulled them together: 92% of the leaders interviewed named conversion as the #1 success factor for the website, even when they disagreed on almost everything else. That became the throughline I carried into every later decision.
“The current website is a reference to a value proposition; however, it never gets used… it doesn't resonate.”
Scoring the existing site against a content design rubric, not a gut feeling
Rather than critique the site on instinct, I evaluated it against a proprietary content design framework — scoring relevance, narrative clarity, best practices, technical writing, trust, and forms & tools on a 5-point scale. This gave the team a shared, defensible baseline instead of a subjective opinion to argue with.
Products were presented assuming users already knew what they were — no guidance toward the right solution for their use case.
The FX rate calculator had no next-best-action — it functioned as a converter, not a lead-generation tool.
Transfer fees and pricing tiers were hidden across the site, undermining the transparency the brand needed to project.
The pattern across every score was the same: the site talked about Convera, not about the problems Convera solved for the person reading it.
480 pages audited to separate what to keep, rewrite, or retire
I partnered on a full inventory of the existing WUBS site — capturing publish date, funnel stage, industry, and a reuse recommendation (modify, use as-is, or retire) for every page — to give the new site architecture a factual starting point instead of a guess.
Two findings shaped the wireframes directly: Google Analytics confirmed the currency converter was the single most-used feature on the site across every region, and most surviving content dated to 2017–2020 — meaning the new homepage needed to work as a strong first impression on its own, not lean on supporting pages that were about to be rewritten.
Translating 14 interviews and a content audit into a homepage layout
With the research synthesized, I moved into low-fidelity wireframes for the new Convera homepage — designed to answer the questions stakeholders kept raising, in the order they raised them.
- Led with a plain-language value statement (“Smart Money Moves”) instead of a product name, directly addressing the “we haven't said who we are” feedback from leadership
- Moved the currency calculator into a prominent mid-page module, reflecting its status as the site's best-performing content and giving it a clearer conversion path than the old version
- Added a trust bar (currencies, countries served, banking partners, bank accounts) to answer the credibility gap the content audit surfaced
- Built a segment-based “Where we can help you” module so treasurers, CFOs, financial advisors, and students could each self-select instead of hunting through undifferentiated navigation
- Structured the page to end on a lead-capture form, matching the near-unanimous stakeholder mandate that conversion was the site's primary job
A research-backed wireframe the client could build against with confidence
The discovery work gave Convera something the old site never had: a documented, evidence-based case for every major homepage decision. Instead of another round of opinion-driven redesign, the wireframes shipped with the stakeholder quotes, audit scores, and analytics that justified them — making it far easier for a historically divided leadership team to align behind a single direction.